Fratros, Eros and Agape
by kate221b
Summary: When John Watson found Sherlock Holmes lying shot and bleeding on the floor Charles Augustus Magnussen's office, he had no idea of the events that would turn his life upside down in the following months. Lost scenes from His Last Vow, seen from John's point of view. Spoilers for His Last Vow.
1. Chapter 1

Inspired by the missing scenes from His Last Vow, and in particular by how John might have reacted to the sequence of events that unfolded.

Rated M for language and some of the more gorey medical details. Probably not a story for the squeamish! I've also gone for medical accuracy over the finer details in the episode on the rare occasions that I couldn't make the two coincide (Sherlock's teeny, tiny thoracostomy scar after emergency thoracic surgery, for example).

As ever, please do let me know what you think. Huge thanks to Sevenpercent and ThessalyMc for critiquing and inspiring x

* * *

John didn't hear the shot; silenced of course, the intruder must have been a professional after all. What he noticed instead was - complete silence. No footsteps, no sound, no voices. Where was Sherlock, and what could possibly be taking him this long?

Janine was awake now, sitting up, starting to talk sense, although he suspect she was mildly concussed. She kept on asking where Sherlock was, and what he was doing. John was asking himself the same question, but memories of Soo Lin, gunned down while he had run off to find her attacker, prevented him from leaving Janine to find out. A rustle from the other side of the room alerted him to the fact that the security guard, who looked like an even shadier character awake than he had unconscious, was awake too, and the next thing he knew, an alarm was sounded, and he was almost blinded by brightness as the lights came blazing on at full power. The security guard had obviously pushed his panic button. John should have thought of that, and taken his alarm away from him when he had checked him for breathing earlier. More company was the last thing that they needed.

''Tell him I'm one of the good guys, will you, Janine?' John said, as the security guard staggered to his feet.

'Ted, this is John. He's a friend of mine,' Janine said, rubbing her head, still sounding dazed. John had no idea what she'd been hit with, but she had quite a lump on her head already, quite enough to explain her semi-concussed state.

Ted grunted, although John suspected that this was more his normal level of conversation than a sequelae of his head injury. 'Shut off those alarms will you?' John hissed, 'if the intruder is still here, we don't want to make them bolt.' Janine reached for the phone and moments later, the alarms shut off as quickly as they'd started.

'Thank you,' John said, shaking his head in an attempt to stop his ears ringing. 'Now keep an eye on Janine will you?' he instructed the security guard as he ran towards the stairs, trying to remember which way Sherlock had gone. Up the stairs he knew, but there were two more floors above this one, so where was he? Think, John. All the doors on the first level up were closed, so he continued on up the next flight of stairs. A man with Magnussen's ego would accept nothing less than the penthouse for his office, he reasoned. Going with his instincts he carried on up. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, a figure was slumped on the floor directly ahead. White shirt, light grey trousers, too stocky to be Sherlock. Magnussen? Had the intruder got to him too?

Cursing Sherlock for forbidding him from bringing his pistol, or even a tyre iron, John stationed himself behind the door, back to the wall, peering round it as quietly as he could to see who else was in the room. There was another figure lying on his back to the right of the door, in front of a large mirror. His head was turned away, but John recognised Sherlock instantly, and throwing caution aside, ran across to him.

He checked for breathing, then shook his friend, and when that failed to provoke a response, slapped his face lightly. There was no external evidence of head injury that he could see, but Magnussen was stirring now and clutching his head, so he could only assume that Sherlock had received the same treatment.

'What happened?' he asked Magnussen.

'Someone shot him,' came the calm reply. Trying to push aside the panic, John opened Sherlock's coat to reveal the red stain on the front of his shirt. Cold panic flooded through him, but he forced his brain into action. Right side of the chest, not the left. Thank fuck for that. But too close to the midline for his liking. Right ventricle, IVC, lung, pulmonary vessel, spinal cord. No, not that, please God, not that, anything but that. If he survived, but was paralysed, then how the hell would Sherlock cope with that?

He felt for a pulse with one hand - weak, thready, but palpable, while dialling 999 with the other. He could feel Magnussen watching him as he gave the details and the address to the call handler. Those cold, calculating eyes. Taking it all in, recording John's reaction for future use. What would his papers say tomorrow John wondered. Something about the love of John Watson for Sherlock Holmes? That would be all they needed - to have those old rumors reignited.

Odd how hard he was finding it to focus, to ignore Magnussen's enquiring glance, to focus on doing what he could for Sherlock. Should he move him? He was an army doctor, for fucks sake, and yet all of his training had deserted him under that reptilian stare.

'Go and let them in,' he snapped at the man, not attempting to conceal his contempt.

'I'm sorry?' this was obviously not a man used to receiving orders.

'The paramedics, go and let them in. They won't be able to get past your bloody security will they? Go and let them in.'

'And I should do that because?'

'Because if you don't, then I'll fucking kill you myself,' John hissed.

And something in his tone must have made Magnussen pay attention, because he left the room with a shrug.

Concentrate, John. Battlefield ATLS, drilled into him so many times. C comes first on the battlefield. Circulation, stop the bleeding. The external bleeding was a trickle only, although he had to rip Sherlock's shirt open to confirm that, the main bleeding would be internal he knew. Pressure on the wound might dislodge a bullet further, causing more damage, better to leave that alone. Sherlock's pulse was climbing, 140 now at the carotid, his radial pulse impalpable, blood pressure less than 70 systolic then. Fuck. He felt like howling in frustration, he had no kit, not even his GP bag. He would have cut off his own arm to give Sherlock his blood if he could have got it into him, but there was nothing that he could do.

Back to the beginning then - A for airway - patent, fast irregular breaths, with no signs of obstruction. That was something. B was for breathing, respiratory rate of forty, but both sides of the chest moving equally when he palpated it; so no pneumothorax - not yet anyway. Should he be putting something over the wound? Stop an open pneumothorax developing? The wound was small, less than two thirds of the diameter of the trachea was the old mantra wasn't it? He couldn't remember. What was wrong with him? Here he was, a doctor, and he was fucking useless. He started to shake as the adrenaline coursed through him. On the battlefield he would have known what to do. He would have had a role, he would have had a kit bag. An Asherman seal to put over the wound, two large bore cannulas and hang the fluid bags; get someone else to squeeze them, air evac the patient to base camp or better still to the ED at Camp Bastion where there would have been a full team waiting, and eight units of blood ready and waiting on the rapid infuser. Fuck, he hoped the receiving hospital would be ready for them. Where would they take him? The Royal London he hoped, best trauma centre in the city. If anyone could save Sherlock then they could.

He heard voices downstairs and footsteps coming towards them, crikey they had been fast. Sherlock was looking waxen now, sweat standing out on his forehead. Panicking slightly, John felt for his pulse. It was still there, but fainter and more rapid than ever. Then the paramedics were running into the room and his training clicked in.

He gave a rapid handover while an oxygen mask was applied, ripping open the cannula packet with his teeth and sliding the cannula into where he knew the vein should be, while the technician ran the fluid from the bag into the giving set; swearing slightly at the lack of flashback, then realising that the flashback was just painfully slow because Sherlock was so shut down. Attaching the fluid to the line, snapping at the paramedic that now wasn't the time for careful fluid administration in a patient who was close to exsanguinating. The first clot might be the best clot, but any fluid was better than arresting from hypovolemia. Pour it in, try to get his blood pressure to a level which would stop him from going into cardiac arrest, that was the priority now.

The paramedic looked at him and nodded at his snapped explanation. 'I served in Hellmand, and before that in Iraq. I'm not telling you how to do your job, but I've seen more gunshot wounds than you've had hot dinners, and I'm telling you that we've got about twenty minutes before this man arrests. So unless you want to crack a chest in the back of your ambulance, I suggest that we scoop and run. Now.'

And scoop and run they did. Onto the trolley, and running with Sherlock to the lift, strapping him in as they went, squeezing the bags of fluid as hard as they could during the seemingly endless trip down in the lift, then running with him into the ambulance, clicking the wheels of the trolley into the locks as the technician started the engine, and the sirens screamed into life as they pulled out into the traffic.

'Don't you fucking die on me, you bastard,' John murmured to his friend, as they weaved through the London streets, and he was thrown from one side of the ambulance to the other, being forced to brace himself with one arm against the side of the trolley. 'Don't you dare die on me, not again. I couldn't bear it. You hear me, Sherlock? You hold on.'

He pushed to the back of his mind the sickening realisation that if Sherlock's heart did stop, then he was the only one here who could do a resuscitative thoracotomy. Could he? Would he? They said that you never forgot. He'd only had to do one in his career as an army medic, out in the field. He'd witnessed others, but there had always been more experienced surgeons there to do the honors.

His one experience had been with a nineteen year old squaddie, out on his first tour, fresh out of training. He'd been shot by a sniper out on patrol, and John had been on the retrieval team who had gone out to get him. The boy had arrested in the helicopter ten minutes out from Camp Bastion, and John had done what he had been trained to do. Clamshell incision from the sternum spreading laterally both sides at the level of the fifth intercostal space, pair of trauma scissors to cut through the sternum, his hands shaking with effort, not with nerves. He had been doing what he was trained to do, what he had practised so many times on pig carcasses in the army training centre before he had been deployed. Through the sternum, suction out the blood - so much blood, how much blood could a human body hold? Pen torch held between his teeth, desperately trying to get a clear view, getting the medic in the helicopter cabin with him to hold the suction with one hand while starting internal compressions with the other, while he grabbed the scalpel, trying to hold it steady against the judder of the helicopter, seeing the hole, slicing through the surprisingly tough and fibrous pericardium to get rid of the blood surrounding the heart, finding the hole ripped through the left ventricle, knowing that he couldn't stop this, couldn't save this man, but not wanting to give up, not now. Continuing to squeeze the heart which took longer and longer to fill, watching the blood turn from dark red to rose as it was diluted by the fluid that they were pouring in. Watching the same fluid disappearing into the suction bag until it was full, switching to a second suction bag, and knowing that the majority of the five litres of blood that this man, this boy, had contained was now in that bag, and not where it needed to be.

He had continued squeezing that heart until they got him into the trauma bay of the ER, to the waiting trauma team; the blood on the rapid infuser, the waiting cardiothoracic surgeon. He had known that it was hopeless, but he had had to try none the less. The team had run for a full twenty minutes, while the cardiothoracic surgeon put in a temporary stitch to close the hole, while they poured ten, twenty, thirty units of blood into the boy, but he was dead. And nothing that they could do would bring him back.

It wasn't the worst injury that he had seen on his three operational tours as a frontline medic, but it was the one that had stayed with him the longest. That feeling of futility, of helplessness, was what had stopped him from pursuing a career in surgery. He didn't like being the last reserve, didn't like knowing that it was him or nothing. General practice suited him better. Even on that rare occasion when an emergency arose, there were usually colleagues around to back you up. And when there weren't, the paramedics were always eight minutes away or less. They had the detachment that John found that he now lacked. His own brush with death after his injury in Hellmand had left him with the odd feeling that the protective layer that he had built up over all those years had been stripped away, leaving his nerve endings exposed. He remembered being horrified as a student at the level of detachment displayed by those on the sharp end; at the black humor that enabled medical staff to laugh in the face of death. It was a defence, he had discovered. Because if you sat down and thought about all the horrors that you had seen, you would end up gibbering in the corner, and that didn't help you or the patient. Better to push it to one side, to crack inappropriate jokes, than to dwell on it.

He had lost that detachment though at some point in Afghanistan. Seeing half a platoon gunned down in front of him, running out to help before the all clear had been declared and receiving a parting shot from the retreating insurgents in his shoulder had made it all too close, too personal. Being wounded, becoming a patient, being certain in that moment that this was where he would breathe his last, out here in this dusty wasteland, was one thing. But what he had really struggled with, what had given him the flashbacks and the PTSD that had eventually invalided him out of the army, was the knowledge that he had let down those men. He had been the medic on that base station. Without him, the wounded men had had to wait until the helicopter retrieval team arrived for medical help. Without him three of them had died, and that was something that he would have to carry with him to the end of his days.

He had to focus now, concentrate on Sherlock, keep him alive until they reached The London. The monitor showed increasing number of ectopic beats, a sure sign of an irritated heart. A cardiac injury then, or perhaps just Sherlock's heart showing the effects of the blood loss. And then another thought crept through him. Icy cold realisation creeping in, as he turned Sherlock's head away from him, grabbed a pen torch from the paramedics pocket without asking, and shone it across Sherlock's neck. His jugular vein, the large vein in his neck, the one that should be flat from blood loss, was distended. That meant only one thing. Back pressure from the heart. He grabbed the stethoscope from where it was lying at the end of the trolley and listened for heart sounds. Quiet, muffled. Bollocks.

'Have you got a long needle?' he asked the paramedic sounding more calm than he felt?

'Only cannulas,' came the reply.

'So what do you do when your patient develops a cardiac tamponade?'

'Put our foot down,' came the grim reply, as the paramedic saw what he was seeing. 'Floor it, Mike, will you? We've got trouble back here.'

'Hold on Sherlock, just hold on,' John whispered, holding his friends hand, because he realised that doctor or not that was all he could do for Sherlock now. Hold his hand, and pray that they got there in time.


	2. Chapter 2

Within seconds of arriving at A&E, the rear doors of the ambulance had been flung open by the technician, and there were suddenly a crowd of people around the trolley as they ran with it in the Resuscitation Room. Trauma Calls at The London were run with an efficiency that reminded John of his army days. Handover from the paramedics was rapid, even as Sherlock was slid over onto the A&E trolley; monitors were reattached, and there were people everywhere; anaesthetists checking his airway, preparing to intubate, listening to his chest, inserting more lines, taking blood; A&E doctors performing a primary survey; nurses cutting off his clothes, his precious coat for heavens sake. John really hoped that he had a spare. Sherlock loved that coat. Surgeons were assessing his abdomen and deeming the injury likely to be thoracic only; the Team Leader was shouting questions and the designated scribe documenting replies, observations and drug doses on the white board in the corner. And through it all, John could only fixate on the monitor showing Sherlock's heart rhythm and pray for it to keep beating.

Feeling suddenly redundant he stumbled to one side, just shaking his head at the nurse's suggestion that he should take a seat in their relatives room. He couldn't leave Sherlock, why couldn't they see that?

Searching the room for a familiar face, for someone who might understand that, he spotted an old medical school colleague standing calmly on the periphery of the bustle. James Macpherson, a quiet spoken Scot, who had been the toast of Bart's rugby team and had drunk John under the table on more than one occasion; but then Mary could drink John under the table, let alone a six foot two rugby player. John had bumped into James at a medical school reunion the previous autumn, only a few weeks before Sherlock's return. He was a cardio-thoracic surgeon here now, John remembered, with an international reputation. If he was the surgeon on call, then Sherlock had a good chance, the best chance that he could have of survival.

'James!' he called across to him, even as the nurses guiding and on his arm, trying to persuade him to leave the room, became more insistent. Relatives, even medical ones, weren't generally encouraged to linger in resuscitation rooms.

'John Watson - what are you doing here?' James asked, coming over to him and nodding to the nurse that she could leave him where he was.

'It's Sherlock,' John said simply, his voice catching slightly as he looked at the still figure on the bed. The anesthetist was tying an endotracheal tube in already - that had been fast, and he noticed that blood was already flowing from the rapid infuser into his friend's arm.

'Were you with him - when he got shot?' James asked, focused on the task at hand, with no time for meaningless platitudes. John was grateful for that.

'Did you see the trajectory of the bullet?' James asked. 'It might be important. Give us an idea of the likely area of damage'

John shook his head. 'I was in another room,' he said, then unable to suppress the medic in him, despite his confidence in the team, 'He's got a cardiac tamponade, James, I'm sure or it. Shouldn't you be...'

'The tamponade is only part of his problem,' James said, indicating the screen of the portable scanner next to he bed, which John hadn't noticed until now. Another shorter man, also dressed in surgical greens, was holding an ultrasound probe on Sherlock's chest wall with one hand, clicking buttons with the other, taking measurements. John could see Sherlock's heart beating on the screen, with a thick black line around the pulsating chambers.

'What is that?' he asked fascinated, despite the situation.

'Bedside ultrasound,' James told him. 'You need to get back to the sharp end John. He has got a tamponade, or rather he's got fluid in his pericardium, but it's not massively compromising his cardiac function. What worries me more is the massive volume of blood he's got in his mediastinum and in both sides of his thorax. It's a miracle he didn't bleed out before he got here.'

'Have we instituted the major haemorrhage protocol?' This last sentence was directed to the leader of the trauma team, who nodded. 'Absolutely. Platelets and FFP about to be hooked up as soon as we get the central line in.' John noticed the anaesthetist had draped a surgical sheet over one side of Sherlock's neck and was expertly inserting the guide wire for a line. His friend was disappearing beneath a swathe of lines and people, and John could only feel grateful for that.

'Tranexamic acid?' To help clotting, of course. They were giving it to all major trauma victims now, John remembered reading something about that last year in a journal. How fast things changed.

'Already in,' came the reply. 'Theatres ready to go?'

James looked across at the Operating Department Practitioner waiting by the phone, who nodded back at him. 'Ready and waiting,' he said. ' Let's get that line in, get the FFP running and then go.'

'Pericardial drain?' John asked, unable to forget that thin black layer of blood around his friends heart. If it got much larger, then the pressure of it would stop his heart from beating altogether, he knew, but James shook his head.

'Not worth the delay,' he said. 'Turn off the tap, John, that's the only way to deal with bleeding, you know that. He needs a thoracostomy - we can have his chest open in theatre within ten minutes, before we'd even have time to set up for a drain.

Sherlock was being connected to the transfer monitor even before the dressing had gone on the central line, the murky coloured bags of fresh frozen plasma, crammed full of the clotting factors that Sherlock so badly needed, were hung from the drip pole, and then they were clicking the brakes off the trolley, a nurse pushing the rapid infuser alongside, and they were running again towards the lift. So many lines, so many people, so much equipment, all focused on keeping one frail human body alive. Sherlock had been wrong. He had told John long ago that the mind was what mattered and that everything else was transport. But his mind needed the rest of him, needed the body that he was frequently so negligent of and careless with. In the presence of danger, it was ironic that his mind had been the first thing to shut down. When the blood had started to pour out of the hole that the bullet had ripped in his chest, his heart had continued to beat, his lungs to breathe, but his mind - his precious mind had disappeared somewhere else entirely. And John knew that there was no guarantee that it would ever be the same again. His body wasn't just transport, it was what kept his brain perfused with blood and fed with glucose and oxygen. Breathing might be boring, but it was also necessary.

John walked along with the trolley, accompanied Sherlock into the lift, watched the monitor with it's frequent ectopic beats, and the blood pressure which still read frightening. 'I want to scrub in,' he said to James, unable to face the prospect of leaving his friend.

James shook his head. 'Not a good idea,' he said. 'No offense John, but you're not a surgeon anymore.'

'Can I observe then, at least.'

James hesitated for a second, and then asked. 'Do you know who did this?'

'I've got a fair idea, yes.'

'And do the police know? Have you told them? The ambulance crew called them, you know. They always do - protocol. They're down in A&E waiting to talk to you.'

'I - no,' John said. 'There wasn't time.'

'Then I suggest that you go and talk to them. Find the bad guy, isn't that what you and Sherlock do?'

'I-' John started as the lift doors opened and the trolley was being pushed through the already open doors into the operating theatre complex directly opposite.

'Go and do your job, John,' James said kindly with a hand on his shoulder, 'And let us do ours. Go and catch the bad guy. We'll take good care of him.'

John could do little more than look at the ground, and nod, knowing that James was right. And as the doors flapped shut behind the surgeon, his last view of Sherlock was of him lying ashen white on the trolley as he was wheeled into the inner sanctum of the operating theatre.


	3. Chapter 3

John stood and stared at the closed door for a moment, debating ringing on the doorbell and begging to be let in. But James was right. He was effectively a civilian here. His presence in theatre would only hinder the delicate surgery that was to follow. He could imagine what would be happening behind those doors; sliding Sherlock onto the operating table, careful not to catch the many lines and wires attached to him, connecting the endotracheal tube to the anaesthetic machine, starting the sevoflurane to ensure an adequate anaesthetic. The anaesthetist would be carefully documenting physiological measurements, twiddling with the knobs on the anaesthetic machine, giving small boluses of meteraminol to attempt to maintain his blood pressure, hanging bags of blood, of platelets, of fresh frozen plasma.

The theatre nurses would be opening surgical packs, slopping betadine over Sherlock's chest, clipping on the surgical drapes while the surgeons scrubbed. Would his heart continue to beat until they were ready to begin, or would there be a hurried scramble to open his chest as the beeping of the heart beat on the monitor got slower and eventually stopped altogether; as his blood pressure dropped precipitously and no amount of fluid or inotropes could bring it back up?

John swallowed and sat down quickly on a handy chair fixed to the wall next to the theatres. Placed there, no doubt for just such eventualities. He couldn't think too hard of what they were doing to Sherlock behind those doors. He had to trust James and his team to do what they could to save his friend. What was the survival rate from a trans-mediastinal gun shot wound? Twenty percent? Twenty five? Higher for the right side than the left perhaps, higher still if you reached hospital and higher yet if you reached theatre. If Sherlock could survive until they could get him on bypass then he had a fighting chance. Christ. John slumped forward, head in hands, trying not to think about it; trying to slow his breathing a little. He hadn't felt like this since the PTSD that he had experienced before he had met Sherlock.

He had been sitting there for several minutes, trying to spur his brain and his body back into action when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. 'John? Are you okay?'

He looked up. It was the nurse - the one from A&E, the one who had tried to get him to leave the Resus Room. There was a porter standing next to her, and a load of monitors and other kit on the trolley. Of course - she would have stayed to help them transfer Sherlock onto the operating table, and then retrieved the trolley and equipmentto take back to A&E, ready for the next patient.

'Yeah, I'm - I'm fine,' John said slowly, realising that he wasn't. He really, really wasn't. Watching Sherlock die once had been - crucifying. Watching it all happen again was - there were no words for this. None at all.

'You go on Sean, I'll catch up,' the nurse said to the porter, as she squatted next to John, hand still on his arm.

'He'll be okay, you know. He's in the best hands,' she said.

'You don't know that,' John said.

'He's got a fighting chance.'

'He's got a good chance of dying too.'

'For what it's worth, if it was my partner in there, then I'd want James Mcpherson operating on him.'

John nodded. Eyes fixed back on the floor. 'I know. James is a good man. He'll do his best.'

They sat in silence for a while. 'Have you been together long?' the nurse asked finally.

'No,' John said looking up at her and shaking his head. 'We're not - I'm not his partner. I'm married.' And then with increasing exasperation 'To a woman. I'm married to a woman. Sherlock is just a friend - a good friend. The best.' He tailed off.

The nurse looked mortified, stuttering, cheeks flaming, 'Oh God, I'm sorry, I just saw the wedding ring, and how upset you were, and I assumed...'

'You're not the first, and you won't be the last,' John said with a sigh. 'Please don't feel bad about it. He's just - he's important to me. I thought I'd lost him before, and I hadn't, and - Oh Christ, you're not going to sell this to the papers are you?'

The nurse smiled. 'Of course not. Patient confidentiality and all that. Not that I would anyway. Look - do you want to call anyone? To be with you? Your wife perhaps?'

John shook his head, 'No, she's pregnant. I don't want to worry her - not until we know.'

'Were you out of your fucking mind?' they both jumped at Lestrade's voice as he strode towards them down the hospital corridor.

'Greg!' John said, unsure why he was so surprised at the DIs appearance. Both the paramedics and the security in CAM news would have informed the police about the shooting, of course, and someone would have contacted Lestrade as soon as they realised the identity of the victim.

'You do what - you break into Magnussen's office, you knock out the security guard, you threaten him with a gun. What the fuck did you think you were up to?'

'We - no!' John said, ignoring the nurse's shocked expression, and how quickly she dropped her hand from his arm. 'That wasn't it at all. Is that what he's saying? We didn't have a gun for fucks sake. And we didn't break in. Janine - his PA, let us in. Ask her!'

'We will when she's medically fit for interview,' Greg said, calming down a little. 'She's in CT scan at the moment. They brought her in the ambulance behind yours. Suspected concussion. Security guard is still babbling too. He's not going to be up to anything much for a while. Promise that wasn't your doing?'

'What - you think I go around clocking people over the head with blunt objects? I'm a doctor Greg, for heavens sake. I've got far more sophisticated ways of rendering people unconscious if I need to.'

Greg smirked, and John couldn't help but crack a smile too, despite everything.

'So I don't have to arrest you?' Greg asked.

'No,' John told him. 'Technically speaking, we did nothing illegal.'

'Is he okay?' Greg asked, nodding towards the operating theatre doors. 'They said he was in surgery. They didn't say how bad it was.'

'It's bad, Greg,' John said soberly. 'It's about as bad as it can get. I thought he was going to die on me in the ambulance. Again.'

'Stupid bastard,' Greg said. 'What did he want to go and get himself shot for?'

'No idea,' John said wearily. 'I was in another room. What is Magnussen saying?'

'Very little,' Greg said. 'He's in a private medical facility across the city. Sounds as if he got pistol-whipped, and now he's claiming concussion and memory loss.'

'How convenient,' John said dryly, then realising the nurse was still there. 'Look, I'll be fine now. This idiot, believe it or not, is a friend of mine. We'll find our way back to the officers in A&E in a bit. and - thanks,' he said as the nurse turned to go. 'For everything. You've been very kind.'

'Pretty,' Lestrade mused as the lift doors closed behind her.

'I hadn't noticed,' John said sarcastically. 'I'm a married man now Greg, remember? Anyway, can we get back to Magnussen? If he can't remember anything then how come he's accusing us of threatening him with a gun?'

'He says he remembers someone breaking in and threatening him. He conveniently can't remember anything at all about that individual, but he's suggested that we draw our own conclusions from the presence of you and Sherlock in his office.'

'What, so he thinks Sherlock shot himself?'

'He suggests bungled burglary. which reminds me - arms up!'

'What?'

'I need to frisk you for a weapon, John. You know how it is.'

'Oh for fucks sake,' John started to say, but stood up and held his arms out anyway, letting Greg pat him down for concealed weapons. Twice in one day, what was the odds of that? He found himself wondering if this was why Sherlock had told him not to bring his gun. That could have taken some explaining, plus a night or two in a police cell while the ballistics came back on the bullet that James Mcpherson was hopefully even now removing from Sherlock's chest.

'He could die, you know Greg,' John said soberly. 'Just because he's got to theatre doesn't mean that he's going to survive. They shot him in the chest; they damaged his heart.'

'Sherlock Holmes die of a broken heart?' Greg said reassuringly. 'I don't think so John, do you? He'll pull through, the bastard always does. He just enjoys making us sweat. Now can I get you to come downstairs and do the formal interview bit? Dimmock and Donovan are waiting in one of the interview rooms in A&E. We need to catch this bastard, before he does the same thing to someone else.'


	4. Chapter 4

Anderson and Donovan were clicking through images on a laptop, pointing and discussing things in low voices when Greg and John and reached the interview room. They looked up as they walked in, and John was gratified to see the concern in their faces.

'Is he - okay?' Anderson asked.

'He's still alive,' John said. 'That's the best we can hope for, for now.'

'Lets concentrate on finding the bastard who did this,' Greg said. 'Any updates?'

'Dimmock has gone across to the medical centre to try to get some more information out of Magnussen,' Sally Donovan said. 'Tyler is working the crime scene with the forensics team - trying to get some DNA from the shooter if we can. Which reminds me, John - we need a DNA sample from you as well, so we can rule your DNA out.'

'Fine,' John said numbly, opening his mouth as Andersen approached him with a swab.

'Right,' Greg said. 'Now that's done, John we need you to have look at these photos we've had sent across and tell us where exactly Sherlock was in the room when you found him, so we know where to concentrate the search.'

The lights were bright in the interview room, and John felt oddly light-headed and disconnected. He ought to phone Mary, to tell her what had happened. He ought to phone Mycroft - shouldn't he? Sherlocks parents even. Christ, he didn't even have their phone number. How would they react? Would they think this was just another magic trick?

'John!' came Greg's voice, making him start.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I was just thinking -'

'John this is important,' Greg said urgently. 'We need to find the shooter before they come back for a second crack.'

'What - you think it was planned?' John said incredulously. 'You can't be serious. Nobody knew that we were going to Magnussen's office. You can't think this was a hit on Sherlock.'

'We're not ruling anything else at this point in time,' Greg said. 'I'm having armed officers placed on the doors to the operating theatre. It might not be chance, John. People don't generally get shot just by surprising intruders. Whoever beat you to Magnussen's office, it was a professional job. They hacked the security system to get in from the helipad doors. That security system was virtually impenetrable. Whoever beat you there, knew what they were doing. They weren't there by chance, and shooting Sherlock could have been a calculated move.'

John pulled out one of the chairs placed round the table and slumped down into it; his legs no longer feeling up to the effort of standing.

'Now, can you show us where Sherlock was when you found him?' Greg was asking

'Here - in front of the mirror,' John said, indicating with his finger on the laptop screen. Anderson used the mouse to click on the position that he indicated. At the touch of a button, the outline of a man appeared, centred on the cross. John took a deep breath. It made it look a little too much like a murder scene for his liking.

'Like this?' he asked.

'Other way round,' John said, 'and further from the door.'

Anderson made some more adjustments, until the outline was in the position that John remembered Sherlock lying.

'And Magnussen? Where was he?' Greg asked.

'Over there,' John said, indicating. Another click and another outline appeared.

'So the shooter must have been between them, yes?'

'No idea,' John said, rubbing the back of the neck, wondering why it had to be so bloody hot in there. 'Sherlock heard something from upstairs. 'A chair scraping perhaps, to let him know that Magnussen was upstairs. He must have disturbed the intruder.'

'Did he know there was someone else there?'

'Of course. We'd found Janine and the security guard out cold.'

'Did Sherlock have any idea who the intruder could be?'

John opened his mouth to explains about the perfume trail, but something stopped him, it was ridiculous, of course it was ridiculous, so instead he shook his head. 'Not really, he said,' unsure why he was so unwilling to give this piece of information away.

Greg nodded. 'So how about you take us back to the beginning John. And tell us everything. No holding back. We can always - sanitise the report a little later to keep his nibs out of trouble.'

And so John recounted the events of the evening. Meeting Sherlock on the ground floor of CM News at 7.30, as instructed. Sherlock taking them through the security barriers and up to the third floor canteen, where they had got coffee, and waited for twenty minutes or so for the building to start emptying. He tried to gloss over how they had got into Magnussen's office, but Greg wasn't having any of it.

'There are layers and layers of security preventing anyone from getting into that office, he said. 'And what, Magnussen's PA just let him in?'

'He knows her,' John said succinctly.

Greg was clicking through images on his laptop as he talked, bringing up a picture of Janine's security pass. 'How did he-,' he started, then, 'Hang on. Wasn't she Mary's bridesmaid at the wedding? Irish girl? Pretty but mildly terrifying? But why would he let her into Magnussen's office?'

'Um...' John hesitated..

'John...' Greg said with a warning edge to his voice.

'Sherlock and Janine have sort of been - seeing each other,' John said.

Donovan choked on a mouthful of coffee, spitting it across the papers on the table. 'Seeing each other, as in...'

'My reaction exactly,' John said.

'Sherlock has got a girlfriend,' Sally repeated in disbelief.

'So what, her boyfriend - and that's definitely something I'll have to process later, by the way - her boyfriend pitches up to see her at work and she just lets him into one of the most secure offices in London? How long have they been seeing each other anyway?'

'A month,' John said with a wince.

'So how did Sherlock know that she'd let him in?'

'He - um - sort of proposed, ' John said, waiting for the explosion.

But there wasn't one. There was just a stunned silence.

'Right,' Greg said, slowly. 'So he meets Magnussen's PA at a wedding in a fortunate twist of fate, presumably wines and dines her to get her to go out with him, and then gets engaged to the girl all in order to get into his office? And was that all it was, do we think? I mean they weren't really...'

'Why are you asking me?' John said. 'All I know is that she was coming out of Sherlock's bedroom this morning - where incidentally Sherlock hadn't been all night, I found him - never mind. But she's moved the coffee in his flat and they were sharing bathroom time this morning, so draw your own conclusions from that.'

'Crikey,' Andersen said, sounding shell-shocked. 'So maybe him and Molly...'

'No!' three voices exploded at once.

'Can we leave your crack-pot theories about his leap of death just for once and focus on the case in hand?' Greg said with a sigh.

'Fine by me,' John said wearily. Christ he was tired. His day had started all to quickly with his decision to be a good Samaritan and rescue Issac. And since then he'd what - discovered his best friend was a junkie, or at least doing a very good imitation of one, that he had a girlfriend, had an audience with arguably the most dangerous man in the Western world, listened to the same man piss into the 221b fireplace, broken into an office with fourteen layers of security, watched Sherlock get engaged and then less than ten minutes later found him bleeding and nearly dying on Magnussen's office floor. It had been an extremely long day, and his bed seemed a very appealing place right now.

'So,' Greg was saying, 'Janine let you into the lift, you went up into the office, and then...'

'She wasn't waiting at the top as we expected,' John said. We went into the office and found her out cold on the floor, she'd been hit across the back of the head by the look of it, the security guard was in a similar state in the room next door,' John said. 'I checked that they were both breathing. Sherlock realised that someone else had beaten us to it. Then he heard a noise from upstairs and went to investigate. He told me to stay with Janine. I stupidly complied.'

'If you hadn't, you might both had been shot,' Greg said reasonably.

'Possibly.'

'And then?'

'Um - then Janine woke up, closely followed by the security guard. The security guard pulled his panic alarm, but I got Janine to turn it off before it could scare off the intruder. Once I knew she was okay, I went to find Sherlock.

'And you found him lying on the floor in Magnussen's office, as you've described'

'Yes.'

'Any sign of anyone else?'

'I don't know,' John said, shaking his head, and taking off his coat, pulling open the neck of his shirt. 'I don't think so.' The room suddenly seemed hotter than ever, the walls closer. He felt trapped, and a little nauseated. 'I need some air,' he said abruptly, turning and walking out of the interview room, through the Emergency Department, aiming for the ambulance entrance, knowing that was always the quickest way out, ignoring the curious glances of the crews waiting to offload as he hit the button on the wall by the doors to get out.

Cool air hit his face and he started to feel better almost immediately. Another panic attack. The second one in less than an hour. He needed to get a handle on this. He needed - Mary, he needed Mary. He sunk down on a bench a little way from the Emergency Department and turned his phone over in his hands, debating calling her, asking her to come here to be with him, but he couldn't bear the thought of having to explain it all again, not even to her. He checked the time on his phone. A quarter past nine.. How could it possibly be so early? A little over two hours since he had wandered out of the tube and walked to meet Sherlock at what he knew now to be the building that housed Magnussen's office. He had been whistling a little as he went, fired up by the challenge of a case after the weeks of boredom. If he had refused to go, would Sherlock still have gone alone? If he had stayed at home with Mary then would events have turned out differently? Would Sherlock have been more cautious or less so? Would he still have been shot? Would he have been found? What if - what if. No point in wondering that now.

All that mattered was that Sherlock was lying on the operating table upstairs, fighting for his life, and he needed to go back into that room and help Lestrade and his team work out who had shot Sherlock and why. And he couldn't do it. Not alone. Sherlock was the one who solved crimes, not him. Alone he was - useless, and lost, and he had absolutely no idea how to do this.

'Brought you this,' said a gruff voice next to him, and a can of Coke was pushed into his hand, as Greg Lestrade came and sat next to him.

'Thanks,' John said, resting the cold can against his forehead for a moment, hoping it would help to focus him.

'I would have brought you coffee, but the machine's out of order. Bloody vandals,' Greg said.

'No, this is good, This is better,' John said, opening the can with a hiss and taking a swig. Cold, sweet. It helped.

'Look John, I know this is - well this is shit, isn't it?' Greg said. 'Here am I trying to get a statement out of you and-'

'You're just trying to do your job, Greg,' John cut in. 'I know that. I'm just - I'm not handling it very well.'

'Can't have been easy. Finding him like that.'

'No,'

'But you got him here alive, John. You did good.'

John shook his head slightly. 'I did very little in the end. There was very little that I could do. And you know the worse thing? I thought that I was going to have to crack his chest in the ambulance, and I didn't know if I could do it.'

'If you had to, then you would have.'

'Would I? I'm not so sure.' John held out his hands. They were shaking.

'Fuck. Look what the bastard has done to me.'

'Done to all of us, John. Again. If he pulls through this then we can toss a coin over who gets to punch him first.'

They sat there in companiable silence for a while. Then John took another swig of his Coke, and said, 'I don't know why he's let this case do this to him, Greg. I don't know why he's gone to the extents that he has to try to get to Magnussen.'

'Is that what this is all about?'

John nodded. 'I think so.'

'And did he really get engaged?'

'Only for about two minutes, but - oh fuck, who's going to tell Janine?'

'Sally's going to interview her in a minute,' Greg said. 'I suspect she might slip it into the conversation.'

John groaned. 'Tell her not to. I'll do it.'

'Sure?'

'Yes.'

'Have you told Mary yet?'

'No- I. I'd rather not tell her until we know - which way its going to go. She'd only worry, and I want to spare her that if I can. She's fond of Sherlock, you know? She likes him, she thinks of him as a friend - a good friend. She'll be devastated. I'd rather be able to tell her that he's going to be okay.'

'And Mycroft?'

John looked at Greg in surprise. 'You mean you haven't told him?'

'Give me a chance, John. We only got the shout just over an hour ago. In that time, I've deployed a scenes of crime team, sealed off the area, and carried out preliminary interviews with the two main witnesses. I think that's pretty bloody fast work. Besides, I assumed that you would have told him.'

'Not yet.'

'You want me to send an officer round?'

'No - I'll, I'll do it. I'll phone him. Sherlock's parents will need to be told too, won't they?'

'His parents?'

'Yeah. I met them not long after his return from the dead. I didn't even know that they existed, did you?'

'No - I always assumed that he and Mycroft were manufactured in a laboratory somewhere, or something. I can't imagine them all sitting round eating Sunday lunch, somehow. They're always so - other, so removed. What are they like, his parents I mean?'

'Normal,' John murmured. 'Very, very normal. Well, no time like the present, I suppose.' He flicked through his contacts until he found Mycroft Holmes' number, then pressed the button to dial, but instead of Mycroft's voice, he got Anthea's.

'Anthea, it's John Watson. Is Mycroft there?'

'No, he's in a meeting. Can I take a message?'

'No, I need to talk to him. It's urgent.'

'He can't be disturbed at the moment, John. Can I get him to call you when he's free?'

'Is he likely to be long?'

'Difficult to say. Several hours I would say. Possibly all night.'

'Can you get a message to him?'

'It's not that kind of meeting, John.'

'Anthea, Sherlock's been shot,' John said, horrified to realise that his voice was cracking. 'Mycroft needs to know.'

'How bad?' Anthea's clipped tones demanded.

'Well he's still alive,' John said. 'But it's touch and go. He's in surgery at the Royal London. Just - tell Mycroft that will you? When you can. Tell him that unless he's preventing World War III, he needs to come and be with his brother; because it might well be his last chance.'

* * *

Huge thanks to Sevenpercent and ThessalyMc for the critique and suggestions. And thank you to all the lovely people who've left reviews. They're the fuel that keeps me writing!


	5. Chapter 5

Short chapter today, but more in the next couple of days, hopefully. Thanks for reading, everyone x

* * *

The conversation with Janine was easier than he had expected. Easier - and more perplexing.

'Did that bastard friend of yours get engaged to me just to break into my boss's office?' she asked, as soon as John walked into the cubicle.

'Technically, I don't think that you actually got engaged,' John said, 'At least, I can't recall you saying yes.'

'Ah, but the papers won't know that, will they.'

'The papers? Janine, what are you going to do?'

'Oh, extract a little revenge I think. I haven't quite decided yet,' she said, still pressing an ice pack to the back of her head. 'Sweet Mother Mary, I've got no idea what I got hit with, but it felt like a crowbar.'

'Pistol butt, we think.'

'Oh, pistol butt. Classy. I suppose I should count myself lucky that he only hit me with it, then. Did they catch the guy?'

'Not yet, no. I take it you didn't get a good look at him?'

'I didn't even see him. I was walking towards the door to meet Sherlock. Next thing I remember I was waking up on the floor, and you were there. Wasn't you was it?'

'No, of course not!' John said indignantly.

'Ah - I'm only teasing, John. Trying to prove that my sense of humour has survived intact. Where is Sherlock, by the way? Too chicken to come and apologise himself? He does realise that he's almost certainly lost me my job?'

'He -' he looked up at Donovan, who had accompanied him back into the cubicle to see Janine, but she just shrugged. Damn, he had assumed that she would have told Janine what had happened.

'He got shot, Janine. By whoever attacked you, we assume.'

Janine went white and her free hand flew to her mouth. 'But he's okay, isn't he? I mean, he's going to be okay.'

'We - don't know,' John said quietly, wondering how many more times that evening he was going to have to have the same conversation. 'He's in surgery at the moment. It could go either way.'

'Well that's one hell of a way to stop someone being pissed off with you,' Janine muttered.

'Janine - about you and Sherlock -'

'Oh save it, John, I knew it wasn't real, I knew it wouldn't last. I was just curious to see how far he'd take it. I should have known that he had an ulterior motive. After all,' she gave John a wry smile, 'I'm not exactly his type am I?'

'Oddly enough, I don't have a clue what his type is,' John said.

'Don't your now,' Janine said, and she gave John a look which was half puzzled and half disbelieving. 'Ah, he's a funny one, your Sherlock Holmes, but he's certainly an experience that I'll never forget.'

'What do you mean?' John asked.

'Well that's for me to know and you to read in the papers isn't it?' she said, moving the ice pack off her head and wincing. 'Ouch. Well if you don't have any other questions for me, Sergeant Donavan, then I'm for my bed. Alone,' this last word pointedly directed at John. 'But then there's no real change there, is there?'

'Janine,' John said as she jumped down off the trolley and picked her bag up from the chair. 'What you said about the papers. You wouldn't really, would you?'

'Give my love to Mary,' she said as she walked out of the cubicle with a smirk.

'Don't say a word,' John said to Sally Donovan, as she opened her mouth to comment.

'Wouldn't dream of it,' she said - 'But-'

'Leave it, Sally,' Greg Lestrade said, pulling back the curtains on the cubicle. 'You wouldn't like John when he's angry - believe me, it's not a pretty sight.'

John opted to go with Greg to try and interview the security guard, but he could add little more than Janine. He too, had been taken by surprise, hit over the head by a heavy object from behind as he patrolled the office area. He had heard nothing, seen nothing. The intruder had entered like a ghost, leaving no sign of their presence.

'Fingerprints?' he asked Greg as they walked back into the interview room, which was temporarily empty. Anderson had gone back to the lab to help analyse the samples from the crime scene, and Sally was off on a search for more caffeine.

'Nothing,' he said. 'At least none that we can't track to people who should have been there - and you and Sherlock, of course.'

'DNA?'

'Not looking good. But there's something else, John, come and look at this.' He spun the computer round, so that John could see the computerised model of the crime scene.

'Look at where you found Sherlock,' he said. 'He didn't get shot at the door when he surprised the intruder, he walked all the way into the room. The intruder let him know that he was all the way inside the room. Now assuming that the intruder got there first, and was already threatening Magnussen, why would he have done that? If the intruder intended to shoot him, why not do it straight away? Why wait?'

'Well, you know Sherlock,' John said, with a forced smile. 'Always got the gift of the gab. He'd try to negotiate with the devil given half a chance.'

'But why would the shooter have let him? Why not just shoot him directly? And then why not shoot Magnussen too? It doesn't add up John.' Greg ran a hand through his cropped hair. 'Something more must have happened in that room. We just have to hope that Sherlock wakes up and is able to tell us.'


	6. Chapter 6

Sherlock had survived surgery.

That was all that John knew, all that he cared about, all that he could hear.

'John?' James Macpherson was saying.

'Sorry, sorry,' John said, focusing his gaze at the picture of the lake scene on the far wall of the ITU relatives room, which he had been staring at for half the night, trying to ground himself. 'I'm just - thank you James. You did a good job.'

'He's not out of he woods yet,' James warned him. 'The next twenty four hours will be crucial. If the bleeding restarts, or if he goes into failure, then he's in trouble. But he's relatively young and fit, so he should have enough reserve to get through.'

John thought about finding Sherlock coming down from his high in the crack den that morning. He hadn't looked particularly fit then. Should he tell James? Sherlock had said that it was for a case, after all, but the toxicology screen that Molly had done had been positive. He had used drugs, and not in the cleanest of environments either. He had potentially put himself at risk of all kinds of infection - not to mention the risks of sharing needles. But he wouldn't have done that would he? He wouldn't have been that stupid. Not even for a case.

'Is there something that I need to know?' James asked, reading the conflict on John's face. For a man who had been operating for most of the night, he was still remarkably alert and switched on.

'In confidentiality?' John asked.

'Of course.'

'And not to go in his notes?'

'Just tell me, John. The smallest thing could make a difference at this point.'

'He's been using drugs.' John's words came out in a tumble. 'He said it was for a case, but I'm not so sure. He had a problem before - years ago. I have no idea how deep it's got this time.'

'Do you know what?'

'Heroin, I think, from how he was this morning. I'm not sure what else. I think he used cocaine before too though, among other things.'

'Has he been using it intravenously?'

'I think so.'

'Then we need to do a toxicology screen, and check him for blood borne viruses - HIV, hepatitis. It's important that we know John, you know that.'

'On the record?' John asked.

'The blood-borne virus screen is routine for the majority of ITU patients anyway - in case we need to haemofilter them, so it's easy to get that done. If the drug screen comes back as positive, then it should be in his notes, so that everyone who is treating him is aware. If he has been abusing opiates then it will have an impact on the amount of analgesia that he needs here to keep him comfortable. Besides, we don't know that Sherlock would object to being tested. We have to act in his best interests at the moment, until he can express an opinion.'

'I've got power of attorney,' John said suddenly.

'What?'

'I've got Long Acting Power of Attorney for him. He did it years ago - so I could stop Mycroft from interfering if he got incapacitated. I'd forgotten.'

'Do you have the form?'

'There's a copy at home somewhere, and one filed with his solicitor. I can call them.'

'Get them to fax it over will you? That means that you can make decisions for him. Does it specify medical decisions and life-saving treatment too?'

'Of course. Sherlock was nothing if not prepared, no matter how chaotic his life might have appeared to outsiders.'

'So can we test him.'

'Absolutely,' John said, realising that this was exactly what Sherlock, who had after all wanted Magnussen to believe that he was a drug addict, would want. It was all about the case, always about the case, and if he ever recovered enough to get back to it, then he would extract some degree of amusement in knowing that the work had continued even while he was unconscious. He considered telling James that Sherlock had already been tested, less than twenty four hours ago and had tested positive - although for what substance, Molly hadn't said. But James would find out soon enough.

'James - I'm sorry I didn't tell you. Before.'

'Before I had my hands up to my wrists in his thoracic cavity?' John winced at the imagery that evoked.

'Don't worry, John. There wasn't exactly a lot of time to play with before we took him upstairs. It's a risk that we always take. Gun shot wound victims round here don't tend to come from the higher stratus of society, if you know what I mean.'

'Gang violence?' John asked interested.

'Sometimes. Or disputes about drugs, both are common. We always try not to judge, of course, but it's refreshing to operate on someone in these circumstances when you know that their survival will be a force for good. Most of the time you're not so sure.'

John reached over and shook James' hand. 'Thank you, James,' he said, with feeling.

'I know how much he means to you, John,' James said. 'I would have done the same for any patient, but rarely have I operated on anyone when I felt that the stakes were so high.'

'Was it close?' John asked.

'He gave us a few hairy moments. There was a lot of blood in both the right side of the chest and the mediastinum. Opening up the pericardium always carries a risk in a patient with a known tamponade. Fortunately we had bypass standing by for when his pressure dropped.'

'Did he arrest?' John asked, back in doctor mode now. Wanting to know, needing to know the details of the surgery that he hadn't been allowed to witness.

'Technically, yes, but it was less than two minutes before we had him on bypass. He shouldn't suffer any lasting neurological damage. Whether he has any long term sequelae from the prolonged period of hypotension is another question. His brain must have been deprived of oxygen for a significant amount of time.'

'He wouldn't handle that well,' John said.

'One step at a time. Let's get him through the next twenty four hours and off ITU first, then we can deal with the rest.'

'So where was the bleeding coming from in the end?'

'The bullet had gone slightly tangentially in at the fifth intercostal space, as you saw. It hit the right middle lobe of the lung, went into the pericardium, just grazed the right ventricle without entering the chamber, but then penetrated the IVC; that was where most of the bleeding was coming from. It ended up lodged in the transverse process of his vertebra posteriorly, Another couple of centimetres laterally and it would have hit his spinal cord, and then he would have been in trouble.'

'Have the police got the bullet for ballistics?' John asked.

'Yes, and I've given them the brief version of his injuries. I said I'd go back and talk to them in more detail once I'd let you know what the situation was.'

'Greg Lestrade's a good friend of mine - and Sherlock's,' John said. 'He's leading the investigation. If anyone can find the shooter, he can.'

'I'll give him as much information as I can,' James said. 'And now here's something interesting for you. I think the shooter was left handed.'

John smirked slightly, despite everything. 'Sherlock rubbing off on you?'

'I've seen a few gun shot wounds. Been to court for a fair few, too. You pick up pointers from the forensic reports. Few gunshot wounds have an entirely straight trajectory, and people tend to veer towards the entry wound was on the right side of his chest, then angled maybe five degrees medially. For a right handed shooter to do that, they would have had to be standing to Sherlock's right and then the angle would have been greater. It's just a hunch.'

John failed to conceal his surprise. 'Well make sure you tell Lestrade about your hunch,' he said. 'It sounds like a good one. And if you're right, it will rule out ninety percent of the population, so that's a good start.'

'I will do.'

'So when can I see Sherlock?'

'They're just moving him onto the unit now. Give them ten minutes or so to get him transferred across and do handover, and you can go and sit with him. I presume that I don't need to warn you...'

'That he'll look like crap? No, that's fine. The fact that he's alive will do me. Tubes everywhere, I presume?'

'He's got a chest drain and a pericardial drain as well as all the usual lines. We'll try and get the pericardial drain out in a day or two - it's mainly there to help us watch for rebleeding. We'll keep him sedated and tubed for twenty four hours at least; optimise his ventilation and cardiac function, correct the acidosis, make sure there's no further bleeding, then if all goes well they'll do a sedation hold tomorrow and see how he does.'

'Thank you, James,' John said, shaking his hand again. 'So, do you get to go home and sleep now?'

James grinned at him. 'What do you think? No, I've got a ward round in -' he looked at his watch, 'Two and a half hours, and then clinic all morning. I'll go and try to get my head down in my office for a couple of hours or so, I think, and then grab a shower in the theatres changing room before starting my day. Still, it was a nice bit of surgery. Makes the sleep-deprivation worth while.'

'You're making me glad I opted for General Practice,' John said.

'More sleep, less glory,' James said. 'I'll come back and see Sherlock after my clinic. In the meantime, they know where I am, if they need me.'

John spent the next ten minutes staring at that picture of the lake again, and turning his phone over and over in his hands. He wondered what Mycroft Holmes could be up to that would justify him leaving John to keep his vigil alone, and wondered if he should phone Mary. Half past five. She'd be getting up in an hour and a half to go to work. Better to leave it until then. If all was going well, he might just leave Sherlock to the care of the ITU staff and go home and try to get some sleep. Alive. He was alive. That was what mattered.

A quiet knock on the door made him jump, and heralded the arrival in the room of two men in scrubs. One introduced himself as the ITU consultant, the other as the ITU charge nurse. The arrival of medical staff in twos always rang alarm bells with John. It generally meant bad news, but not it seemed on that occasion. Sherlock was critically ill, but he was alive. The next twenty four hours would be crucial, he knew this. The situation could deteriorate. Sherlock was currently being kept alive by a cocktail of inotropes, anaesthetic agents, blood, clotting factors, and various pieces of extremely complex machinery, but none of that mattered. He was alive. And if he could survive jumping over a hundred feet off a roof to certain death, then he could survive this.

Not even seeing Sherlock lying, pale and unresponsive, surrounded by a myriad of beeping and clicking machines, with fluids being poured into him and drained out of him, could take away the overwhelming feeling of relief. John sat with Sherlock for a while, held his hand and talked to him in a way that he never would have been able to had he been awake. It reminded him oddly of his conversations that he had had with Sherlock at his presumed grave, and he remembered him saying, 'I heard you.' He hoped that Sherlock could hear him now, as he told him that they needed him to wake up and get well. That Lestrade needed his help to solve the case. That they needed him to tell them who had shot him, and that Magnussen was still out there, and needed to be stopped. That the game was still on, and waiting for him.

Whether Sherlock heard him or not, he had no idea, but the fact that he could be here, talking to him, was enough. And leaving a case unsolved just wasn't his style. John was banking on that.

* * *

This chapter is deliberately medically accurate, rather than entirely accurate to the screen version. Because unfortunately there's no way that Sherlock could have survived a gunshot wound in that place, with a cardiac arrest, without having bilateral thoracostomies, and that very neat little scar that we saw on screen just wouldn't do it.

I'm not an intensivist or a cardiothoracic surgeon, so if anyone does spot any inaccuracies please do PM me and let me know. I'm hoping I've made it as realistic as I can. As ever, thank you all for reading x


	7. Chapter 7

Thanks as ever to ThessalyMc and Sevenpercent for the advice, and to everyone for reading and for the lovely reviews. Glad you're all enjoying it!

This scene comes BEFORE the Mary running up the stairs in the hospital one, before anyone gets confused. All will be explained soon, I promise.

* * *

He texted Mary from the cab on the way home an hour later.

'On my way back. Hopefully catch you before you leave for work.'

'Everything okay?'

'I'll explain when I see you.'

He couldn't face telling her over the phone. Better to wait another twenty five minutes until he could get home. He fired off a quick text to a Lestrade too, telling him that Sherlock had survived surgery, that it looked as if he would pull through.

Then he pulled up Mycroft's number and sat there considering. He hadn't heard from him. Not a word. He couldn't still be in that meeting, surely? Had he contacted the hospital directly or did he simply not care? Logically, John knew that wasn't the case, but still, he found Mycroft's degree of disconnection frustrating. After Sherlock's jump from Bart's roof he had been the same. Cold, removed. It wasn't the disinterest that John had found so hard to bear, it was his entire disconnection with John himself. As if Sherlock's apparent removal from Mycroft's life necessitated an end to his connection with John also. After two years of being expected to drop everything at Mycroft's phone call to keep Sherlock safe, he was suddenly simply ignored, like a Victorian governess once their ward was safely married.

Despite his grief, John couldn't help but be offended by this. It wasn't as if he and a Mycroft were ever exactly going to be best friends, but there had been an acquaintance there, a connection in their concern for Sherlock. John had risked his life in the pursuit of cases for Mycroft, and suddenly it was simply switched off, like a light in an empty room.

He considered texting Mycroft to tell him that Sherlock was out of surgery; phoning Anthea even, but then why should he? Let Mycroft stew a little longer, if he cared at all.

The ringing of his phone made him jump. Damn the man, how did he always do that?

'Is he alive?' asked the familiar voice without preamble.

'Morning Mycroft. Lovely to talk to you too,' John said briskly.

'Is he alive, John?'

'Yes, he's alive. He survived surgery. He's on Intensive Care at The London.'

Mycroft Holmes let out a sigh of relief. 'Thank God,' John thought he heard him mutter.

'What happened?'

'He got shot. Mycroft, where have you been ? I phoned you hours ago.'

'I was in a meeting.'

'You were in a meeting for - ' John looked at his watch. 'Ten hours?

'Longer.'

John had no reply for this. 'What happened, John?' Mycroft asked.

'He got shot,' John said bluntly.

'I am aware of that. I am asking how and why he got shot.'

John struggled to control his temper, wondering why Mycroft Holmes always had this effect on him. 'You mean you haven't seen the police report yet? You're slipping, Mycroft.'

'I have just come out of a meeting which lasted for far longer than should have been possible. On my reemergence into the world of humanity, Anthea immediately informed me of the events of last night. She has done a little research to flesh out the details, certainly, but I have looked at none of this. Instead, my first reaction was to telephone you to discover if my brother was alive and to ensure that the culprit had been detained. So if you wouldn't mind, John, tell me what happened.'

John sighed, and sat back in his seat, rubbing his aching neck, and wondering how much he should tell Mycroft. But it would all be in the police report anyway, wouldn't it? And Mycroft might be able to help find the shooter who had disappeared like a ghost.

'We went to Magnussen's office,' John said.

'Why?'

'Sherlock was looking for something that he thought might be there,' John replied.

'Lady Elizabeth Smallwood's letters? For an intelligent man, my brother really can be remarkably stupid. They were bait, of course. Bait for a fool, and he fell straight into the trap.'

'You think it was a trap?' John said. 'And how the hell did you know about the letters?'

'I watch John, I observe. I knew that Lady Smallwood had been to 221b Baker Street. I was aware that Magnussen had made contact with her, and I was aware of the likely nature of her so called pressure point.'

John let out a string of soft swear words. 'Mycroft, if you knew what was going on, then why the hell didn't you do something to stop this?'

'I warned him John, if you remember. I warned him yesterday morning, but since when have I been able to stop my brother from doing anything that he felt was required for a case? Now tell me about the shooter.'

John gave Mycroft a brief summary of events. He told him of their entry into the building and the office. He chose not to include the use of Janine, and Mycroft, who was flicking through the police reports while John was talking by the sound of it, chose not to ask. He told him of finding Janine and the security guard out cold on the floor, of Sherlock going upstairs to Magnussen's office, and of finding Sherlock collapsed on the floor some ten minutes later.'

'Nine minutes,' Mycroft murmured.

'What?'

'It was fourteen minutes between you and Sherlock entering the lift and your telephone call to Emergency Services. Allowing for the seventy five seconds that it takes for that lift to reach the top floor, the three minutes it would have taken you to walk through the office and discover the staff members on the floor, and the average of forty five seconds that it takes someone to contact emergency services when they discover a loved one collapsed, that leaves nine minutes unaccounted for.'

'Do we have to do this now, Mycroft?' John asked wearily.

'I'm on my way back,' Mycroft said in clipped tones. 'I should be there by this afternoon. I suppose I could contact Lestrade in the interim for the finer details, if there's nothing else that you can tell me about the shooter.'

'He was left-handed, we think, if that helps.'

'Who thinks?' Mycroft suddenly sounded interested.

'James MacPherson, the surgeon who operated on Sherlock, based on the bullet trajectory. It's an interesting theory, although...'

'I'll look into it,' Mycroft said, and then he was gone in his usual abrupt way.

'Thank you, John, for saving my brothers life - again. Thank you, John for keeping a vigil for him all night, not knowing if he was going to live or die. Thank you John, for turning your life upside down, yet again. No of course, fucking not!'

The cabby slid back the partition to the passenger compartment as they stopped in traffic, half turning to ask, 'You alright,mate?'

'Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry.' John mumbled, realising that he had been shouting at his phone.

'We'll have you home soon. Been at work have you?'

'You could say that,' John replied.

...

Mary must have known from his expression when he walked in, because the first thing she did when he walked through the door was enfold him in a huge hug. 'You reek of hospitals,' she said. 'What happened?'

'Sherlock-' he started, then shook his head as his voice started to crack. Mary pulled him over to the sofa and sat him down.

'Sherlock what? Did he get hurt? Is he okay?'

Mary looked tired too, he registered. She was dressed for work, make-up partly hiding the dark shadows under her eyes, but she looked pale beneath it, as if she'd hardly slept.

'Didn't you sleep?' he asked, trying to delay the moment when he'd have to tell her.

'I had a late night with Cath,' she said. ' Stupid really. You know what we're like when we get talking, and then I kept waking up to see if you were home yet. But stop changing the subject. Tell me what happened.'

'Sherlock got shot,' he said, looking down.

'What? John, no. What happened? Is he okay?'

'He's been in surgery most of the night. But he's alive. Just. He's on ITU at The London. Christ, Mary. I thought I was going to lose him again.'

Mary's face was a perfect image of loving concern, as she pulled him into her arms, and let him rest his head on her shoulder. 'I thought he was going to die,' he whispered, and she held him, and rocked him, and he fought back the urge to cry.

'Is it bad?' she asked when he finally pulled away, accepting a tissue from the box that she handed him and blowing his nose loudly. 'I mean, where did he get shot?'

'Right side of his chest, but the bullet ended up going through his IVC.'

Mary went so white that he thought she might faint. 'Hey, hey,' John said. 'He's okay, well he's not okay, but the odds are on his side now. It was getting him through surgery that was dicey.'

'But you said he got shot on the right side of his chest. The inferior vena cava is in the middle, isnt it - so how did that happen?'

'It was on the right side, but closer to the middle than I thought initially too. His damned shirt must have been slightly off centre. From where the wound was relative to the buttons I thought that it would be a simple lung injury too, but it wasn't. It was a proper mediastinal injury. The bullet just clipped the right atrium, went through the IVC and missed his spinal cord by a couple of centimetres.'

He paused. 'You okay?' he asked, noticing that Mary's colour had gone from white to green. 'Back in a sec,' she said as she ran from the room.

Morning sickness. Of course. At eighteen weeks it was finally starting to abate, but it still took her by surprise at times.

'Sorry,' she said when she returned a few minutes later. 'The parasite is making it's presence felt again.'

'It's a beautiful parasite,' he said, putting a hand on her neat, and hardly noticeable bump. If you didn't know, you would hardly realise that she was pregnant.

'So is Sherlock going to be okay? Really? I mean, they repaired the damage? Is he going to have any long term consequences of that, do you know? Have they said?'

'Hey, slow down,' John said, reaching out her hand, feeling oddly as if he was comforting her. He'd known that she liked Sherlock, but he hadn't expected her to be quite so upset by him being hurt. 'He's alive. That's good enough for me at the moment. I thought he was going to die in the ambulance, or in the resus room in A&E, or in theatre. All of those looked very possible last night. But he's on ITU, and he's doing okay, and James, the cardiothoracic surgeon who I know from medical school is cautiously optimistic. We don't know what effect the prolonged drop in blood pressure will have on him in the long-term. I mean, he could have hypoxic brain injury, but lets just take it one step at a time.'

Mary pulled him into another hug. 'I'm sorry, John, I'm so sorry.'

'It's not exactly your fault, is it? But I appreciate the sentiment. Lestrade and his team are looking for the shooter, anyway. Let's hope they find him.'

'Any clues?'

'Not yet. He disappeared like a ghost. No DNA, no fingerprints, nothing.'

Mary nodded, thoughtfully. 'Professional job?'

'Looks like it.'

'Poor Sherlock,'she murmured. Then, 'Shall I run you a bath?'

'Don't you have to get to work? I don't want to make you late.'

'And leave you on your own after the night you've had? Not likely. I'll do a swap with Tracey. She's on admin this morning, I think. Good job you're on a day off. You going to cancel the rest of the week?'

'I don't know,' John said, running a hand through his hair, suddenly realising exactly how tired he was. 'Maybe. Depends what happens. I'll phone them later, get them to cut down on my clinic for tomorrow anyway, just in case somebody else does have to step in.'

He heard her on the phone while he was in the bath. 'All sorted?' he asked as he re-emerged into the bedroom, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.

'It's fine. I swapped my morning baby clinic for this afternoon's dressing one. I don't have to be in until two.'

'You swapped into a leg ulcer and stinky wounds clinic? You must really love me.'

'I must, mustn't I?'

And then she curled up with him in their perfect bed, arms tight around him, holding him as he fell asleep. And all he could think was, '_Thank God for Mary. Because even if I did lose Sherlock again, at least I'll have her. At least I'll always have her.'_


	8. Chapter 8

He woke from an uneasy sleep several hours later. From the light filtering though the curtains it must have been late afternoon. There was a note from Mary on the pillow beside him. '_Gone to work. They've cancelled your clinics for the rest of the week. Give yourself a break, you've got enough to worry about. See you later, M x'_

He smiled. His beautiful, beautiful wife. Pregnant with his child. He was fortunate, wasn't he? He should be counting his blessings. Wasn't this what he had always wanted? And then feeling guilty for that brief moment of contentment when Sherlock was still on the proverbial critical list, he checked his phone quickly for missed calls. There weren't any. Good. No news was good news, as they say. If he had deteriorated then they would have phoned him.

Sitting up in bed, he googled for the number of the Royal London, and got put through to intensive care. The news was good. Sherlock was stable. They were weaning down the inotropes. There hadn't been any rebleeding. John let out a breath that he hadn't realised that he'd been holding.

'Sherlock's brother came to see him,' the nurse said cautiously.

'Ah,' John said. 'I probably should have warned you about him.'

'He was very - forceful,' the nurse said. 'Especially about security.'

'He's very protective of Sherlock,' John said.'Did he talk to James, too?'

'Yes, he did. And to our intensive care consultant here, as well. And to the head of security at the hospital. Among others.'

'Sorry,' John said. 'And did he try to move Sherlock to a private facility somewhere?'

'He proposed it. He seemed slightly - put out, to discover that you had Power of Attorney. I suspect that he'll be in touch.'

'I'm surprised that he hasn't already,' John said dryly. 'So are there specific visiting hours? I was planning on coming in shortly.'

'Any time until ten o'clock this evening,'

'Then I'll be in in an hour or so.'  
...

Walking onto the intensive care unit that evening, he noticed the two plain clothes security men flanking the entrance doors. The ear pieces would have given them away as being part of Mycroft's team, even if their snappily cut suits hadn't. 'Good Evening, Dr Watson,' one of them said pleasantly, as he pressed the buzzer to be let into the unit.

He was shown into the relatives room, where he found James MacPherson deep in conversation with Mycroft. He looked somewhat relieved at John's entrance.

'Everything okay?' John asked.

'We were discussing the possibility of transferring Sherlock to another unit,' Mycroft said.

'For safety?' John asked, deciding it was wisest not to let in that the was aware that this was the second conversation of the day on this topic.

'Of course. I know of a secure, private hospital with intensive care facilities, which we could move Sherlock too as soon as Mr MacPherson* is happy to sign the release papers.'

'And does the secure private hospital have a cardiothoracic surgeon on site 24/7?' John asked pleasantly.

'Well no, but I'm sure that-'

'Then he stays here,' John cut in. 'There's safety and safety, Mycroft. I think that the threat to Sherlock from rebleeding necessitating immediate further surgery, is greater at the moment than the chance of an assassin gaining access to Sherlock past all the layers of security that you've put in.'

'The shooter got into Magnussen's office past all of his security.'

'But they weren't expecting him. Your men are. And besides, I don't for a second think that Sherlock was the intended target. He was after Magnussen. Sherlock was just the accidental victim.'

'Then explain to me, if you can, why Sherlock is the one lying in a hospital bed, while Magnussen remains virtually unscathed?' Mycroft said, apparently oblivious to James' presence. 'If Magnussen was the intended victim, then why not kill them both? Why shoot Sherlock and leave?'

'I don't know why,' John told him. 'But that's not the point. The fact remains that moving Sherlock from here would, in my opinion, be dangerous. James? What do you think?'

'I wouldn't advise it,' James said. 'In a few days, maybe, when he's off intensive care and is more stable, but not now.'

'Then that's settled,' John said, firmly. 'So how is he doing, James?'

'Pretty well, all things considered. We've been weaning down the inotropes, he's maintaining his blood pressure, the output from the pericardial drain has been minimal. If all goes well they're going to try to get him off the ventilator and wake him up tomorrow.'

'And neurologically? Any clues there?'

'No way of knowing until we try to wake him up, I'm afraid, but for what it's worth we did a CT head as part of a whole body scan earlier, and that was clear.'

'To check for other injuries?'

'Exactly. We would have done it last night, but he was too unstable.'

'To risk the doughnut of death?' John asked, remembering the old name for the CT scanner from his SHO days. Corridors and lifts were the most dangerous place in the hospital for an intensive care patient, let alone the scanner room itself. 'Of course. So just the thoracic injury then.'

'That's right. We did an echo earlier too. Cardiac function is looking good, and that's backed up by his reduced need for inotropes. Renal function is starting to pick up. His kidneys took a fair knock from the drop in blood pressure, but we've got him on a renal dose of dopamine, and that's helping.'

John caught Mycroft's set expression out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't have a clue what we're talking about, he realised. But he's too proud to ask for an explanation.

'So you're going to be able to avoid haemofiltration do you think?' he continue. Let Mycroft be on the back foot for a while. It made a nice change.

'Looks like it,' James said.

'Good,' John said. 'That's good. It's very good in fact. So now we just have to see if he wakes up.'

'Exactly.'

John nodded. 'So is that you finished for the day?' he asked.

'Certainly is. Switchboard have got my number though. I've asked the, to contact me direct and not the on-call if there are any problems with Sherlock.'

'Did you contact your parents?' John asked Mycroft after James had left.

'No.'

'You mean you couldn't, or you decided not to.'

'John, believe me, it is better for my mother not to know until the danger is past.'

'But surely -'

'Sherlock and I agreed long ago, that if either of us was either temporarily incapacitated, we would prefer not to have our parents - concerned - until after the event.'

'You mean you don't want your mother flapping.'

'She can do nothing, John. Why ruin her holiday?'

'Of course - they're in the States aren't they. And your father? Are you going to tell him?'

'My father is more - saguine. I would tell him if I thought that he could keep the information from my mother. However, in the circumstances, it seems wise to allow them to remain in ignorance.'

'But you would have told them about Sherlock's drug use.'

'Only because I felt they could bring some useful pressure to bear on the situation. Speaking of which, you may find this interesting.'

He slid a lab report across to John. The results of Sherlock's toxicology report. Heroin, cocaine, ketamine. He groaned. 'They shouldn't have given this to you, Mycroft. It should have been confidential.'

'They didn't give it to me. I procured it via - other means. Are you surprised by the results?'

'Not really, no. Is this what he used before?'

'The ketamine is new. I was aware that he'd dabbled in the past with various pharmaceutical substances, although heroin and cocaine were always his drugs of choice. So what do you suggest that we do about this, John?'

'He's intubated on intensive care, Mycroft. I doubt that he's going to be able to access drugs from here. When he wakes up, then we'll have to address it with him, I presume. He said it was for a case, though, didn't he? Isn't that possible - that it's just for the case?'

'Three drugs, John? One might have been enough to convince Magnussen. Even witnesses to the action of him buying drugs, of frequenting those places that they can be obtained would have been enough. There was no need for him to actually take them. Two drugs would speak of indulgence, but three? Three drugs to me spells addiction. Again.'

'They cut heroin with ketamine all the time though, don't they?' John said, wondering why he felt the need to defend Sherlock. 'He might not have known what he was taking.'

Mycroft raised an elegant eyebrow. 'This is Sherlock Holmes, we're talking about, John. Do you honestly believe that is possible.'

John swore softly under his breath. 'Let's just take this one step at a time, shall we? Get him off intensive care first, then we can find out exactly how deep this goes.'

...

Sherlock looked slightly better when he went in to see him. Less pale, although that was no doubt partly helped by the bag of blood hanging up by his bed.

'Haemoglobin was 8.6 when we rechecked it,' the intensive care nurse told him. We're topping him up by a couple of units.'

There was still a trickle of blood into the chest drain, John noticed, but the dressing across Sherlock's chest looked dry and clean. 'May I?' he asked, indicating Sherlock's charts, clipped to the stand at the end of the bed.

'Of course,' the nurse said. 'Mr MacPherson has told us to share any information with you that you need.'

The numbers were looking good, although John could see that the previous night certainly hadn't been all plain sailing. Sherlock was being well looked after, that was clear. But John had seen too many patients deteriorate at Day 2 or 3 post-operatively to be counting his chickens yet. The road to recovery would be far from easy, he was only too aware of that from his own experience. Medical complications aside, getting well required patience, and that was one quality that Sherlock rarely exhibited. John predicted tantrums and set backs, and all of these he was more than happy to cope with. If Sherlock would just wake up and start grumbling about how bored he was, then John would know that he was on the mend.

The drugs - the drugs were something else entirely. Despite his reassurances to Mycroft, John had no idea how deep this addiction went, if an addiction it already was. John still had problems believing that, but the large doses of fentanyl that the staff had been having to use to keep Sherlock comfortable spoke a different story. They were two or three times that which John would have expected for a man of his age and build, suggesting that Sherlock had built up quite a tolerance to opiates. Had he been using for the whole of the month since John had last seen him? And did that, perhaps, explain why he had been avoiding him? John had been waiting for his text, summoning him to help on a case, but his phone had been strangely silent. His phone calls had gone unanswered, and when he had dropped in on 221B, Mrs Hudson had invariably told him that Sherlock was out.

So why did John feel so guilty? He couldn't help but feel that he had been a poor friend to Sherlock since his marriage, and even before, since his return. Having him as best man had helped. Sherlock had thrown himself so headlong into wedding plans, no wedding organiser could ever have been more dedicated. Mary had told him that it was all about control - Sherlock felt uncomfortable with the position of best man, and more so with the position of best friend that John had presented him with, and so he overcompensated by micromanaging everything. Models of the venue. Napkin folding, for heavens sake. John should have known that something was wrong at that point.

After the wedding - after the honeymoon, things had seemed off kilter somehow. He couldn't persuade Sherlock to visit their new house out in Kew (Mary, it turned out, had inherited a tidy sum from her parents, enough for the deposit on a small house in a reasonable area. Far nicer than anything he could have afforded on his own). He had seen him a couple of times when they had got back from honeymoon, but since then - nothing until he had found him in that squat the previous should have tried harder, should have contacted Mycroft, maybe, but if he was honest with himself, he had enjoyed the respite. He hadn't expected getting married to change anything, but it had, or maybe the baby had. Either way domesticity was surprisingly enjoyable. Did he miss the excitement of the cases? He hadn't thought so. Not until that morning, when suddenly going to rescue Isaac from that place had seemed like the best idea in the world. Sherlock was right, he had enjoyed it. He had missed it.

'You'd better wake up soon, you annoying bastard,or I'm going to start getting myself into even more trouble on my own,' he told Sherlock. Odd to have him so quiet, so unresponsive. Even during those long periods of silence in 221b, Sherlock had never been as motionless and still as this. It was unnerving somehow. The profound silence, broken only by the beeping of the cardiac monitor, showing less ectopic beats today, John was pleased to note, and by the hiss and click of the ventilator.

'And thanks for leaving me to deal with your brother on my own, too. You're in trouble, by the way, but I'll tell you about that when you're feeling a bit better. The good news is that he hasn't told your parents yet, so you won't get your mother weighing in - not yet anyway.'

'Oh and a card arrived for you. From one Charles Augustus Magnussen. Wishing you a speedy recovery - the cheek of the bloke - and a quote, 'When one man strikes at the heart of another, he rarely misses.' What does that mean do you think? You'd better wake up Sherlock, and tell us what happened and why. Because Mycroft is dead set at finding out who shot you, and I know you'd hate it if he worked it out before you woke up to tell us why we've got it all wrong.'

'He's trying to work out why the shooter targeted you and left Magnussen with nothing more than a nasty bump on his head.' John's brain was working overtime as he talked, but he continued to think aloud. 'But he didn't exactly target you, did he? Two bullets to the host and one to the head, that's what we were taught in the army. That's how to kill somebody. So unless I disturbed the shooter, then why not do it properly? Why shoot you once in the chest and leave it at that?'

John sighed. There was so much information going round in his head, he had no idea what to do with it all. 'Wake up, Sherlock, please. I need you to help me work all of this out. Because I can't help feeling that there's much more to this than a bungled burglary, or someone trying to get to Magnussen. None of this makes sense, and you know that I'm crap at working through this stuff on my own.'

* * *

* In the UK, surgeons are known as Mr or Miss, not Dr (even if female surgeons are married, they're still known as Miss). It's something to do with the fact that surgeons used to be barbers, and not medical doctors, and now it's a sort of badge of honour...

Big thanks to sevenpercent for the fine tuning!


	9. Chapter 9

The news from Lestrade hadn't been hopeful. The shooter had disappeared like a ghost, leaving no forensic trace of his presence. Even Mycroft's team had been unable to discover much more than the signs of the intruders entry and exit from the helipad doors above, nothing more.

John had racked his memory banks for anything that could help Lestrade; any clues, however small, from his brief time in Magnussen's office; things that he might have seen, or heard, and subsequently discounted. He had tried Sherlock's visualisation techniques, closing his eyes, imagining every step of his journey with Sherlock from the lift shaft up, through the office, finding Janine and the security guard, going up the stairs, finding Sherlock and Magnussen in the office, but there was nothing new that he could add to his previous statement. He envied Sherlock his perfect memory, apparently unaffected by emotion. When John tried to remember the evening of the shooting, all he felt was the fear and panic of finding Sherlock lying unresponsive on the ground.

'Stop torturing yourself,' Mary told him. 'It was a random hit by the sound of it. What does it matter?'

'It matters to Mycroft,' John said dryly. 'You think he's going to let whoever did this to Sherlock walk free, Mary?'

'If they're as good as you say that they are then he may not have any choice.'

'But it's odd, isn't it?' he asked her. 'As Mycroft says, why shoot Sherlock, but leave Magnussen unscathed?'

'Maybe Magnussen still had something that they wanted?' she said. 'You don't shoot someone before you've got what you came for. Anyway, why are we talking about this again? Cup of tea?'

So what did the shooter come for, John wondered, as Mary went into the kitchen to make the tea. Secrets, he presumed, no great challenge in working that one out. If it had been an assassination attempt, then it was unlikely that Sherlock's presence would have prevented it. Which left someone trying to reclaim their secrets. And goodness knows there were enough people out there who wanted that. Nothing like narrowing down the field.

His sleep that night was again interrupted by dreams of Sherlock - falling, bleeding, dying. Dreams that woke him up sweating and shaking, trying not to disturb Mary, sleeping peacefully beside him. Because she needed her sleep, and because what he felt he had no desire to put into words at this point in time. And there was something else, a half-recovered memory from his dream, of Sherlock muttering about perfumes in Magnussen's office. Claire de Lune, he had mentioned Claire de Lune. A perfume - and the musical signal that the French Resistance fighters had used to identify each other in WWII. Was there a clue in that? What else could it mean? Who else wore that perfume, other that Mary? Sherlock had thought that he knew who the intruder was. How could he have forgotten that? And he had identified them from perfume. A woman? Could a woman have done this? Who would have? He could think of only one woman from their encounters who could have done this, and she was long gone, beheaded in Karachi. Or was she? Could Irene Adler have been behind this once again? But if so, then why would she have shot Sherlock?

Abandoning sleep, he got up and pulling his dressing gown round him, padded into the kitchen to make yet another cup if tea. What was it with tea and the British in a time of crisis? It gave your hands something to do, and then your brain something to concentrate on as you drank it. Even the warmth of the mug was comforting as you held it. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece - 5.30am. He considered calling Lestrade, as soon as it became a more reasonable hour, telling him about the perfume, but it sounded crazy even as he rehearsed the sentence. How could a woman have done this? Why would they have?

He fell into an uneasy doze on the sofa, lulled by the low murmur on the television, and was woken by Mary some time later with a crick in his neck and the low throb of a headache.

'I thought that you were going in to see Sherlock at half nine?' she said, as she turned the television over to the breakfast news,

'I was, I mean I am,' he said, looking at his watch. 'Christ, I'd better get a move on. I've got an appointment to talk to the James and the ITU Consultant about where we go from here. Are you coming?'

'Do you want me to?' she asked. She still looked tired, John registered. 'No, you stay here and put your feet up,' he said. 'I'll tell you what they say later.'

It was a long journey on the tube from Richmond to Whitechapel, although thankfully he was deprived of the necessity of changing lines, and was able to remain in his precious seat, still holding his now empty paper coffee cup, as the carriage filled at Victoria, and then re-emptied again after Westminster. He was just congratulating himself on the fact that he might get there in time after all, when the tannoy announced that the train would terminate after the next stop, due to a temporary suspension of service. He knew what that meant. A jumper under the train. It depended on the sensibilities of the announcer as to whether they declared the true nature of the problem or not, and when they did, it was often with an edge of irritation, as if frustrated at the selfishness of the person driven to that desperate act. It was the tube drivers that John felt sorry for. It must be what they all dreaded - seeing a body launched from the platform, slamming on the brakes, knowing that they couldn't stop in time, but trying all the same. Mind the Gap. Sometimes people wanted to fall into the gap, and there was nothing that anybody could do about that.

He joined the scrum of people leaving the train, and emerged into the September sunshine at Mansion House. 9.05am. Time to find a cab if he was going to stand any chance of getting to the hospital in time for his appointment. Appointments could always be postponed, of course, but the army had instilled in him a deep sense of propriety and punctuality. He preferred to keep his appointments if he could,

Checking his phone for messages, as he walked towards the main road to find a taxi, he discovered a missed call from a withheld number, received no doubt while he had been in the deeper parts of the tube network. There was also a voice mail from one of the ITU nurses, asking him to call her back. Fuck. This couldn't be good. He selected the number from his contact list rapidly, but it rang out. Trying again, the phone was eventually answered by a ward clerk, who could only tell him that all of the nurses were busy and ask him to call back later. In the background he could hear the familiar beeping of a monitor, followed by the shouted 'stand clear' of a cardiac arrest.

John thanked the receptionist, and put the phone down, fighting back the sensation of panic and the familiar dizziness that came with it. The phone call - the missed phone call must have been to tell him that Sherlock had deteriorated. It was his cardiac arrest that John has heard in the background, he was sure of it.

And he was too late, he was going to be too late. Breaking into a run, he headed for the nearest taxi rank, trying to flag down any available taxis as he went. He phoned Mary as soon as he had climbed into the front cab in the rank and given the cabbie the hospital as his destination.

'What is it?' she asked, answering it on the first ring.

'I don't know for sure - but I got a missed call from ITU while I was on the tube. They wouldn't talk to me when I phoned back, but I could hear an arrest going on in the background. Mary - I think, I mean I could be wrong, but I think -'

'I'm on my way,' she said. I'll meet you there.

'No you don't have to. Stay there, until we know.'

'I'm coming, John. I don't want you to have to deal with this on your own.'

'Then get a cab. The tubes are down. Someone jumped in front of a train at Cannon Street, by the sound of it, and the line's shut from there. I'm in a cab heading to The London now.'

'I'll be there as quickly as I can,' Mary told him.

Fifteen minutes later, John was sprinting up the stairs to ITU, and as he'd expected was met at the door and escorted into the relatives room by one of the nurses to wait. That bloody lake picture again. If he ever had to see that picture again after this was all over he'd...

Anger. He remembered the anger from before. Remembered the hours he had spent at the gym, thumping punch bags bounding on the treadmill, trying desperately to channel it, of he couldn't repress it. His hands clenched into fists as he concentrated on trying to slow his breathing. 'You see what you do to me Sherlock? ' he wanted to say. 'You see why I try to distance myself from you, to try to have a normal life. Because every time you pitch up, then sooner or later I end up like this.'

He wanted Mary to be here, to be with him to hear whatever it was that they were going to say, but it was too late. The door was opening, and the ITU consultant that he recognised from the previous day and one of the nurses were coming into the room, and he didn't want to hear whatever it was that they had to say. That they had done all that they could, but that despite the drugs and the compressions his heart had stopped, and all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't get it started again.

He braced himself for it. But they didn't say that. They didn't say that at all. What they did say was that Sherlock had woken up. They had done a sedation hold that morning, and within thirty minutes he had started breathing for himself, opened his eyes and tried to talk. They had removed the endotracheal tube that he no longer needed, and he had tried to talk to them. 'He got very agitated,' the ITU consultant told John. 'We had to sedate him again to stop him pulling out his lines. He kept saying Mary, over and over again, just that one name, Who is Mary? His girlfriend?'

'No,' John said stupidly, shaking his head. 'Mary is my wife.' The consultant and the ITU nurse looked at each other, and John smiled slightly at their discomfort. 'No, really,' he said. 'It's nothing like that. But how odd, are you sure that's what he said?'

'No mistaking it,' the nurse said. 'It was just that name, until we sedated him again. We thought he might find it easier with someone he knew here, patients often do. That's why I called you. We thought that if you were happy to sit with him for a while, we could try turning down the sedation again, see how he does. He might still be confused, of course, it might not work, but we'd like to wake him up if we can.'

It didn't take long, not long at all. Ten short minutes perhaps, between the midazolam infusion being turned odd and Sherlock opening his eyes, blinking, and then staring at John for several minutes, as if trying to confirm who he was, blinking as he struggled to focus on him.

'John,' he said finally, his voice hoarse from the recent removal of the tube.

'Morning,' John said, with a smile that betrayed some of his relief.

Sherlock looked past John at the partition wall that separated his bed space from that of the patient next door, then turned his head to the other side to take in the mass of machinery, and looked at John questioningly, licking his cracked lips.

'Here,' John said, lifting up the plastic cup of water he had been provided with, angling the straw so that Sherlock could take a grateful sip of water. 'Not too much though or I'll get told off.'

'You're in Intensive Care at The London,' he said, as he put the cup back down again.

Sherlock blinked, as if trying to clear his head, but remained silent.

'You got shot, Sherlock,' John said bluntly. 'You nearly died.'

'Mary,' Sherlock said, slowly.

'Christ, what is it with you and my wife?' John said with a smile. 'They said that her name was the first thing that you said when you woke up. She's on her way over to see you.'

Sherlock closed his eyes and coughed once, again, then the cough turned into a spasm that sent the saturation monitor alarming, and had the ITU nurse sitting him bolt upright in the bed and placing an oxygen mask over his face in addition to the nasal oxygen that he was already receiving. His eyes flew open, as his face reflected the pain that the unexpected movement caused in his surgical wound. The nurse pressed the boost button on the fentanyl infusion, and within minutes he was resting back, breathing settling, his face calm again.

'Surgery?' he asked John, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'Bilateral thoracotomies. Sorry about that. Going to be sore for a while. No running around for you for a few months.'

'Sorry,' Sherlock said, and then closed his eyes and with seconds was asleep.

'Nice to see you too,' John muttered, but he couldn't stop the grin spreading over his face, Sherlock was back. He was going to be okay. Everything was going to be fine. He would be able to tell them who had shot him, and everything would be - fine.


	10. Chapter 10

Walking off the unit for a breath of fresh air some time later, he saw Mary running up the stairs, as soon as he walked out the door. She looked worried. He had forgotten in all of his relief - he'd forgotten that she cared about Sherlock too and would have been just as worried as he had been.

'He's only bloody woken up,' John told her, as soon as she was within hearing distance 'He's pulled through.'

'Really? Seriously?'

'But you, Mrs Watson, you're in big trouble.'

'Really? Why?'

'His first word when he woke up? 'Mary!''

He laughed at her expression of bemusement, and when she hugged him, he felt an echo of his own overwhelming sense of relief. Sherlock was going to be okay. He was alive. There was no greater gift than this.

'Can I go in to see him?' Mary asked as she finally pulled away. 'If he's been asking for me?'

John shook his head. 'He's asleep again. Later though, you could go back and see him later.'

'I might just do that,' Mary said.

...

John and Mary went for surprisingly good coffee in the ubiquitous coffee shop in the foyer, then went back to see Sherlock. He was still asleep, and looked likely to remain so for some time.

'I might pop into work,' John told Mary. 'Just for a few hours. I've got some admin to catch up on.'

'Appease the guilt a bit, you mean?' Mary said.

'It's what the NHS is based on isn't it?' John said with a grin. 'Guilt and good-will. Without that, the whole thing would crumble. What are you going to do for the rest of the day?'

'Bit of shopping maybe. I'm bursting out of all of my clothes. Might have to bite the bullet and buy some fat person ones.'

'Maternity clothes, you mean, I believe that's the technical term.'

'What I said. See you back here later?'

'Absolutely. I should be finished by four, so see you back here fiveish? Then we could go for dinner in Chinatown afterwards.'

'Perfect,' she said kissing him. And then they walked hand in hand to the tube station, where he took left Mary to take the Jubilee line towards Covent Garden, while he took the District and Circle back to the surgery.

John spent a pleasant afternoon at the surgery. As a locum he had been concerned that he might have blotted his copybook by taking time off, but his colleagues greeted his return with genuine pleasure, and he was brought endless cups of coffee as he ploughed through the stacks of results, and correspondence that had piled up in his absence. He left a little after four with a clear conscience, and a promise to return bright and early on Monday, for the joys of the usual post-weekend packed surgery.

Arriving back at The London, he texted Mary, and was checking his phone for a reply, when he bumped into her coming out of Intensive Care.

'I thought you were going to wait for me?' he said, surprised.

'I got here early, got bored of shopping. Turns out maternity clothes are all stuck in the 1970's - did you know that? I mean, they genuinely still have dungarees in those places. What's that all about? So, rather than depress myself even further by buying normal clothes that I won't be able to fit into for the next six months, I thought I might as well come back and see if Sherlock was awake.'

'So you've seen him.'

'Briefly. He seems pretty doped up, John. What on earth have they got him on?'

'Fentanyl, I think. And then all of the propofol and midazolam that they've had him on will still be floating round in his system. Did he talk to you?'

'Not really. He said my name, looked a bit confused, and then went back to sleep.'

'Did they update you on how he was doing?'

'I didn't ask too much. I thought I'd wait for you." She bit her lip, 'He looks like crap, John,' she said quietly. 'So many tubes, and drains, and -'

'Hey, hey,' he said, pulling her into a hug, 'He'll be okay. He'll be fine now. You know that.'

'What if he'd died John?'

'But he didn't,' John murmured into her hair, still holding her close. 'You can't live with 'what ifs' Mary, they'll drive you mad. I was the world expert at those, remember? You can only deal with the here and now. And Sherlock is alive, and he's going to get better. And that's all that any of us need to know for now.'

Mary nodded and pulled away. 'You're right, you're right,' she said. 'I just - don't like hospitals. Too many bad memories.'

'You're a nurse!' John said. 'How can you not like hospitals?'

'Hence my decision to work in the community,' she said. 'But I mean I don't like them from the other side. From the patient and relative side.'

Mary didn't like talking about her parents, about what had happened to them, but John knew that her bad memories of hospitals were related to their deaths seven years ago, only six months apart. But there was likely to be another need for a hospital visit in the next few months. Now probably wasn't the time to address that, but - sod it.

'So...,' he said, staring meaningfully at her bump.

'Home birth,' she said briskly. 'Don't mind do you?' Then with a smirk. 'I though we could install one of those giant inflatable birthing pools in the middle of the living room and get an underwater video camera. Actually that's not a bad idea...'

She laughed at his expression of horror. 'I'm joking John. Truth is, I haven't really thought about it. We can talk about it at another time. Look do you mind if I head home? I'm tired, too much shopping, I think, and I don't think I really want to see Sherlock again like that. Not today, anyway'

'No, of course not. Take a cab though will you? You look tired.'

'There's a thin line between concern and control, you know that?' she said, then kissing him on the cheek. 'I'm pregnant, not ill. I'll be fine on the tube. I'll see you later.'

Sherlock was still sleeping when he got back to the unit, so he went to find James in his office for an update. The news was good. The pericardial drain was out, there was no evidence of any further bleeding, the chest drain was clamped and could probably come out the next day. He was off inotropes, and his renal function was picking up. It was all very much going the right way.

'We've got him into a side room on the unit,' James said. 'But if all goes well, we could get him into the private wing tomorrow.'

'That soon?' John asked, surprised.

'No reason to keep him on here once we're sure that he's stable off the ventilator and the inotropes. We'd normally suggest 24 hours in HDU as a step down, but, well Sherlock's brother is extremely keen, shall we say, for Sherlock to be moved to a private room.'

'Security again?'

'He has - concerns, shall we say, about the number of people coming in and out of the critical care complex.'

'And has he suggested putting lights and sound into the room you've got lined up for Sherlock yet?'

'I believe that it's been suggested,' James said wryly, '- and thankfully rejected in no uncertain terms by our head of security as an unacceptable invasion of privacy. The security guards on the door to the unit, and the ones he's got lined up to stand outside Sherlock's door once he's on the private wing should be enough. Still, under the circumstances, his concern isn't exactly surprising. Any news on the identity of the shooter?'

'Not really,' John said. 'Nothing concrete anyway. The police are still working on the assumption that Sherlock was the accidental victim.'

'But you're not so sure?' James asked.

'Sherlock doesn't believe in chance,' John said. 'Nor do I. I'm just hoping that when he's a bit more awake, he'll be able to tell us himself.'

'His brother tried that earlier,' James said. 'No joy. He's fairly sleepy on the doses of fentanyl that he's needing to keep him comfortable though. We're going to switch to morphine overnight, see how he does on that.'

'Is that wise?' John asked. 'With the history of abuse, I mean. What about a thoracic epidural, would that be an option?'

'It's still opiates, though. And given how close the bullet tract came to the spinal cord, I'd rather not if we can avoid it. There's no evidence of any neurological damage that we can tell, but we'd rather know if he's going to run into any problems.'

'Haematoma?' John asked, his brain clicking through the possibilities.

'It's unlikely at this point, nothing showed on the CT on day one, but with an injury like that, the risk of delayed bleeding is always there. The morphine as a background infusion and a PCA is our safest bet.'

'You do realise that he'll have the code on the pump cracked, and be turning up the infusion rate himself within about three minutes?' John said. 'Better be prepared to think laterally.'

...

Walking into ITU ten minutes later, he found Mycroft sitting next to Sherlock's bed. Sherlock was lying still, eyes closed, breathing slow and even, pretending to be asleep. John wondered if Mycroft was fooled.

'Still asleep?' John asked.

'Apparently so.'

'Did you get any sense out of him?'

'He woke up briefly earlier, acknowledged my presence, and then strangely enough when I asked him about the identity of the shooter, he became overtaken by drowsiness, and has remained uncommunicative ever since.'

'Ah.' John said,

'Ah, indeed.' Mycroft looked at his watch. 'I have a meeting to attend. See what you can get out of him will you, John, and let me know if he chooses to divulge anything? I would worry less were the identity of the perpetrator known. But my brother will, I suspect remain as intransigent as ever.'

'Perhaps he doesn't remember.'

'And perhaps he does. Now that would be more interesting, wouldn't it?'

'He's gone,' John said, a few minutes later, standing up slightly, and peering round the door to watch Mycroft's receding figure exit through the door to the unit. 'You can stop pretending now.'

But when he turned back to the bed, he found a pair of grey-green eyes already watching him.

'How did you know?' Sherlock's voice was dazed and sleepy, that much wasn't a pretence. But he looked better than he had the previous day, less pale. More like his normal self.

'That you weren't asleep? I've spent hours watching you sleep, Sherlock. And hours watching you lying immobile but awake on the sofa. I know the difference. So, it would appear does Mycroft.'

'He wasn't sure though.'

'No, he wasn't, John said with a grin. 'So was that just to piss him off, or-'

'Didn't want to talk.' Sherlock's words were slightly slurred from the drugs. He shifted slightly in the bed, pushing down with his arms to try to move his torso while keeping it as straight as possible, but still he winced in pain, and John noticed both the increased rate in his breathing and the cardiac monitor recording an increased heart rate.

'Are you in pain?' he asked. 'I'll get the nurse, she's just outside.'

'Boost button,' Sherlock gasped, as he lay as still as possible, eyes squeezed shut. John recognised that pose. It was the position that you assumed when knew that the slightest movement would cause you pain. John reached over and pressed the boost button on the fentanyl infusion, watching both Sherlock's face and the cardiac monitor, and observing the swift effects of the fentanyl. The morphine that they were planning to switch him to wouldn't be as fast. How would he cope with that, he wondered.

'Better?' he asked a few minutes later.

Sherlock nodded slightly. 'Bad?' he asked, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'What?'

Sherlock indicated the equipment with his head. 'All this - where did the bullet go?'

'Inferior vena cava,' John said. 'Clipped a bit of lung on the way. Bad enough.'

'I saw Moriarty,' Sherlock said drowsily.

'What?' John felt as if the room temperature had suddenly dropped ten degree.s How was that possible? Had Moriarty faked his death too? Had he somehow been the one who shot Sherlock?

'Moriarty shot you?'

'No, of course not. I don't remember who shot me.I don't remember seeing anyone in that room other than Magnussen.'

'So how could you have seen Moriarty? Sherlock, he's dead - isn't he?'

'Of course he's dead, John,' Sherlock's words were becoming increasingly more slurred as he slid towards sleep, 'But then so was I.'

* * *

Huge thanks to sevenpercent and ThessalyMc for 'keeping me right', as ever.


	11. Chapter 11

John tried to ask Sherlock what he meant by his comment about Moriarty, but there was no waking him. He debated asking the nurses to turn the fentanyl down, reverse it even, so that he could double-check what he had meant, but the meaning had been clear. Sherlock hadn't seen Moriarty in the physical world, he had seen him in his mind when he was lying in that half-land between life and death. Heaven or hell, John wondered. Which did Moriarty represent to Sherlock?

John waited by Sherlock's bed for another hour or so, but he showed no signs of waking again, and so with a nod to Mycroft's guards on the door, John made his way back to the main entrance of the hospital. Pulling his phone out of his pocket as he went he found a text from Mary. _'Got an SOS call from Cath. Neil is being an arse again. Heading over there to offer tea and sympathy. Will pick up a take away on my way back, but could be some time M x.'_

As soon as John had set foot outside the hospital, his phone rang. Mycroft, of course. John glanced up at the nearby CCTV cameras, wondering if he was being watched, and then realised that there was a far more simple solution. The security guards must have alerted him to John leaving the unit, and he was phoning for an update.

'He doesn't remember anything about the shooting, Mycroft,' John said as soon as he picked up the phone.

'You mean that is what he told you. Tell me what he said, word for word.'

John recounted the crux of his conversation with Sherlock to Mycroft, omitting the part about faking sleep, and hesitating before mentioning Moriarty.

'All of it, John,' Mycroft said with his usual edge of irritation. And John found himself recounting the Moriarty comment.

'James Moriarty is dead,' Mycroft said calmly. 'I saw the body myself. There was no doubt.'

'You saw Irene Adler's body too - the first time.'

'The circumstances that time were different.'

'So there is no chance...'

'None.'

'Only forgive me, but people do tend to have a habit of coming back from the dead in the circles that you move in.'

'Whoever shot Sherlock, John, it certainly wasn't James Moriarty.'

'So we're no closer to knowing who shot him?'

'Oh I wouldn't say that.'

John sighed wearily, leaned against the entrance to the underground station and squeezed the bridge of his nose. 'What do you know, Mycroft?' he asked.

'Tell me one thing, John. Do you honestly believe my brother when he says he doesn't remember who shot him?'

'I don't know.' John said. 'But why would he lie?'

'Why indeed?' Mycroft said, and then with a click he was gone.

'Mycroft - what-' John started, but there was just the dialling tone. John let out a string of swear words that earned him a dirty look from a woman struggling to get a small child and a baby and a buggy down the steps to the station. In an attempt to redeem himself, John muttered, 'Sorry, bad day,' grabbed the front of the buggy and helped her down the steps with it, earning himself a smile, and a small step towards restoring karma.

He hesitated at the junction between the corridor to the District and Circle and that to the Jubilee line for several minutes, not wanting to face the empty house with all of those thoughts going round and round in his head again. Eventually, he took the steps towards the Jubilee line and Baker Street. Now that Sherlock was awake, he'd be wanting some things from home. His pyjamas, his beloved dressing gown, his phone charger, a toothbrush, shaving stuff.

'He knows,' a quiet voice in his head said. It sounded horribly like Irene Adler. 'Mycroft knows and he's not telling you. Now why would that be?'

Shut up, he told it, because another voice was creeping in, his own, and that said the thing that has been puzzling him all along. Why shoot Sherlock once in the chest and leave it at that? If the intruder had wanted to kill him, then why not shoot him in the head, and if they didn't want to kill him - then why shoot him in the chest at all? Why not aim for another, less perilous site? John could make no sense of it, none whatsoever.

Mrs Hudson was in the hallway within seconds of John's key turning in the lock, and John realised guiltily that nobody had updated her on Sherlock's progress. As far as she knew, he was still lying unconscious on ITU.

'Hello, Mrs. H,' he said. 'Good news. Sherlock's going to be okay, we think. He's woken up.'

'Oh I know,' she said. 'That nice young lady who works for Mycroft has been keeping me updated. You'll be wanting to pick up some things for him, I suppose. I've ironed him some pyjamas, and got his leather holdall down for you. Folded up his second best dressing gown. I wasn't sure what else he'd need.'

'That's fine, I can sort the rest out,' John said.

'Is he really going to be okay John?' she asked. 'I mean, these things can make people go a bit, well, funny, sometimes. Does he seem - normal, well not normal obviously, but does he seem like Sherlock?'

'He's still very groggy,' John said, 'but yes, he still seems to be firing on all cylinders. I think he's going to be fine.'

'Good,' she said, following him up the stairs. 'Well come on then, let's get his things together for him. I've made him some mince pies too, he always liked those. Thought you could take them in to him.'

'It's September, Mrs H,' John said.

'Yes, well. They're about the only thing I bake that he'll reliably eat. Thought he might need something to tempt his appetite.'

Being in 221b without Sherlock was - odd. It reminded John uncomfortably of those days after Sherlocks presumed death when he had sat there for hours, addressing Sherlock's empty chair, trying to make sense of it all. He hadn't been able to bear the aching void left by Sherlock's absence. He had seen him everywhere in those early days; seen him sitting at the kitchen table, performing one of his blasted experiments, seen him sitting in his chair when he had walked into the living room, heard his tread on the stair, his slam of the door. He had seen him on street corners, in cafés, in taxi cabs. It had almost been enough to make him believe in ghosts. Moving out had been easier than living with the constant reminders. New flat, new life, burying the past. And now? And now Sherlock was back, but he had moved on and he almost wished - almost wished that it could all just go back to the way that it had been before. If he had been here, would Sherlock have cooked up the plan to use Janine to get to Magnussen? Would he have ended up in that crack den? John thought not.

'John?' came Mrs Hudson's tentative voice from behind him.

'Sorry, Mrs H, I was just-'

'Bad memories, of course, there must be. But he'll be back, John, of course he will be. It's not like before,'

'Did you know?' John asked curiously, realising the oddness of Mrs Hudson never having rented the flat out again while Sherlock was gone. Two years, for two years she had left it empty. She had boxed up some of Sherlock's things, in the first couple of weeks after his presumed death, but there it had ended. John had found himself unable to help and had told her to consult Mycroft to see what should happen to his possessions. Something must have stopped her clearing the flat. And the rent - there was the other odd thing. She might say that she couldn't bear to rent it out to someone else, but the rent from her flat was a large chunk of her income, John knew, how had she been able to afford to leave it empty?

'No,' Mrs Hudson said. 'I didn't know.'

'But the flat?' John asked. 'You left it virtually untouched.'

'That was Mycroft's suggestion,' she explained. 'He offered to pay the rent - all of it, that is, if I preferred to leave it as it was and not rent it out again.'

'Did he say why?'

'He said he might have need of it again one way. He wouldn't say anything else.'

'Oh.' John said with a frown, realising that Mrs Hudson had had what he hadn't - she had had hope. 'So you DID sort of know.'

'Not for sure John. I just - hoped. Killing himself wasn't really Sherlock's style was it? He was always so full if life, so positive, well apart from his down days of course. It just didn't seem like something he would do.'

'And what did you mean the rest of the rent?' John asked, suddenly picking up on her earlier comment. 'You mean my half? Did Mycroft pay Sherlock's half before?'

Mrs Hudson looked uncomfortable. 'Oh come on Mrs H. The cat is well and truly out of the bag now.'

'The rent, John. Did you really think you'd get a flat in central London for six hundred pounds a month?'

'Sherlock said that you owed him a favour.'

'I'm very fond of Sherlock, dear, as you know. But I couldn't afford that sort of favour.'

'So what - Mycroft topped up the rent? Did Sherlock know about that?'

'Of course not. You know what Sherlock's like, John. He thinks that things just sort of happen. His clothes miraculously pick themselves up off the floor and end up washed and folded back in his drawer, milk appears in the fridge, bills get paid. He doesn't really live in the same world as the rest of us does he? I'me always surprised that he carries money at all - like the Queen. Do you know that she never carries money? Doesn't have to, of course.'

'So - Mycroft paid you to let us both live here?' John asked, desperately trying to bring the conversation back on track. And paid you to look after Sherlock.'

'Not paid dear, no. Just - contributed to his expenses.'

'Did he pay you to spy on him too - no I don't mean spy, I mean to report back?'

'John Watson, what sort of person do you think that I am? Of course not!'

'Did he offer? Because he tried it with me too, you know, when I first said I was going to move in.'

'Oh of course he tried, but I'm not scared by the likes of Mycroft Holmes. I told him that I would keep a motherly eye on Sherlock, make sure that his washing was done, his shirts were ironed, the flat was kept clean, that sort of thing, but that was the end of it.'

'And you did keep an eye on him, Mrs H,' John said softly. 'We both did.'

'Wasn't enough to stop him going back on the drugs though, was it?' Mrs Hudson said with a sigh.

'You knew about that? I mean before the other day?'

'I suspected, John. You learn to recognise the signs. I was going to mention it to you, next time, I saw you, but - well, it's been a while, hasn't it. And I wasn't sure. If I'd been sure I would have called. Of course I would.'

'He says it's all for a case,' John said, ignoring the snipe about not visiting. He'd been busy for heavens sake. He had a job, he had a wife. So why did he feel so guilty?'

'Well he would, wouldn't he?' Mrs H was saying, and John wrenched himyself back to the current conversation.

'But you're not convinced?'

'Well it's not for me to say John, is it. It's a nasty business, that's all, and he's a fool if he thinks that he can just pick those things up and drop them again when he feels like it.'

A book on the shelves caught John's eye. 'That book, Mrs H. The one about drug addiction. Did you put that there?'

'No, Sherlock brought it with him when he first moved in. It was in one of those boxes of his.'

'Oh.' John frowned, wondering what to do with this information. 'What do you think I should do then?'

'Talk to him, John. He trusts you, and he cares what you think. Cares about you more than he cares about anyone, and - well, I don't know what went on between you two, but I know love when I see it. And Sherlock does love you, in his own funny way. That hasn't changed.'

'Mrs H, Sherlock and I-'

'Oh I know, you've only ever been good friends. So you keep saying dear, but be that as it may, if anyone can get him to talk about why he's using drugs again, it's you. He'll talk to you, John, I'm sure that he will.'

John packed up the items that he thought that Sherlock would need for the next few days, and left 221b in a sombre frame of mind. Drug dependency was one thing that he never thought that he'd have to deal with in such close proximity. Despite all of his years of general practice, he felt ill equipped to deal with it. But this was Sherlock. He loved Sherlock like a brother - closer than that. He remembered reading about the Greek theory of the four loves - Fratros, Eros, Philia and Agape. Philia that was easy - friendship, liking another human being, wanting to spend time in their company, now that was simple. Next came Fratros, the love between brothers, and then came Agape, the higher spiritual love, often between men. The love that drove men to die for each other; to kill for each other. John sniffed, and turned up his jacket collar against the biting wind, in an unconscious imitation of Sherlock. Love, what did he know about love? Sherlock was Sherlock and Mary was Mary, and he cared about them both in different ways, and that was all that he needed to know - wasn't it?

* * *

Thanks to to Sevenpercent and ThessalyMc, without whom my writing would be a lot more nonsensical and less well punctuated!


	12. Chapter 12

Mary got back to the house minutes after John did, plastic carrier bag full of takeaway in hand as promised.

'How's Cath?' he asked.

'Oh, you know,' she said, as she pulled plates out of the kitchen cupboard, and John started pulling the lids off the plastic containers of curry. 'She should call it a day with him really, but she's still in the pre-contemplative stage of telling him to piss off.'

'Pre-contemplative?'

'Yeah you know, like with the stages of dealing with addiction?'

John looked blank. He'd obviously 'deleted' that part of his medical education, although it looked as if it was all going to get a little more relevant now. He was starting to wish that he'd paid more attention in his psychiatry lectures.

Mary shook her head at him and sighed in mock despair. 'The pre-contemplative stage is when people are trying hard to ignore the fact that they've got a problem,' she said. 'Next comes the contemplative stage, when people acknowledge that they've got a problem, but can't work out what to do about it, then preparation, then action. Basically, Cath's got a long way to go before she sees sense and kicks the stupid bastard out on his ear.'

'And which stage do you think Sherlock's at?' John asked, slowly.

'You really think that he's got a problem? With drugs? I thought that he said that it was all for a case?'

'And you believe him?'

'I - I'm not sure. You should give him a chance to explain though John, surely, before you jump to conclusions. You know what he's like. There may be a reasonable explanation. And even if he is using, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's addicted.'

'Oh Mary,' John said, walking over to her, and wrapping her into a hug. 'I wish that I had your faith in humanity.'

'You mean that you think that I'm naive?'

'No, I mean what I say. But maybe you're right. Either way, I don't want to think about it tonight. I want to eat Indian takeaway with my beautiful wife, watch crap telly, and try very hard not to think about the mess that Sherlock Holmes has got himself into this time.'

...

Exactly how big a mess became apparent not long after John walked into Sherlock's room early the next afternoon. When he'd phoned ITU in the morning, he'd been told that they were about to transfer Sherlock onto the private ward. They'd suggested that he give them a few hours to get him settled before visiting, so he'd delayed his visit until later than normal.

Walking into Sherlock's room, John found him asleep. He put the leather holdall of clothes etc into the locker beside Sherlock's bed, and settled himself down to wait for his friend to wake up. He pulled out his copy of The Metro that he hadn't got round to reading on the tube earlier, and found himself automatically skimming the paper for cases that Sherlock might be interested in. Even now, old habits died hard.

He was aware of Sherlock's slow, even breathing as he read, then found himself listening more closely. Something was off. John knew what Sherlock looked and sounded like asleep, and what he looked and sounded like when he was unconscious, and this was somewhere between the two. His breathing was slow. Not dangerously slow, but much slower than it had been since his surgery. John's eyes flicked to the monitor. Saturations were a little low, even on the oxygen. He got up and turned up the oxygen being delivered by a couple of litres. And then he spotted the morphine pump. It was turned up to ten. He checked the concentration of the morphine on the label on the side of the syringe, swore, and reached to try to turn it down. It should have been locked by a code. It wasn't, and responded immediately to his press of the buttons, as he turned the infusion rate to zero.

'You stupid bastard,' he murmured, as he pressed the call bell for the nurse and lifted Sherlock's eyelids to check his pupils. They were tiny, pinpoint. Of course they were. The tell-tale pupils of someone who had had way too much opiate.

'He's turned up the morphine infusion,' he told the nurse. 'He's out for the count. Get the anaesthetist on for the pain team in here, will you? We might need to reverse it.'

He shook Sherlock, and then when he got no response, administered a firm rub with his fist on Sherlock's sternum; the time-honoured way of waking up a drowsy patient. This earned him a mumbled swear word, and his hand was pushed away. Not completely comatose then, good. John did a quick calculation of Glasgow Coma Score, trying to work out exactly how unconscious Sherlock was. Eyes were remaining firmly shut, earning him a score of 1; Voice - inappropriate words, or were they appropriate? He'd give him 3 for that; Movement - localises pain, 5. So his GCS was nine. Better than it could have been. But he had warned James about this, hadn't he? He'd warned him that Sherlock wouldn't be able to resist fiddling with his own morphine infusion; that he'd turn it up. Did this prove dependency, or just the endless need to solve a puzzle and prove that he was more clever than anyone else? John wasn't sure.

A very worried looking anaesthetic registrar arrived, and after a blood gas sample which proved adequate ventilation, she and John decided between them that they could safely avoid reversing the morphine. While administering naloxone to block the effects of the morphine would wake Sherlock up rapidly, it was likely to leave him in screaming agony for several hours, and morphine would then have no effect on his pain until the naloxone wore off. Worse still, if Sherlock had a true opiate dependency, then it would also precipitate withdrawal symptoms. As long as they observed him closely, it was safer to watch and wait for now, and then try to find an alternative method of giving him analgesia when he finally woke up.

James MacPherson turned up at the same time as the anesthetic consultant, who looked sheepish to say the least.

'We discussed it, John,' James told him. 'It was thought unlikely that Sherlock would be able to break the code on that particular pump in his current state. Obviously we were wrong.'

'I've known alcoholics drink the alcohol gel from the hand sanitiser dispensers,' John said, 'It's amazing the lengths that people will go to. But this is Sherlock Holmes that we're talking about. Of course he was going to crack the code. I did warn you.'

'And we've learnt out lesson,' the anesthetist said briskly. 'So what do you suggest?'

'A background infusion rate, which he can put up for a maximum of twenty minutes at a time, before it reverts to a background rate,' John said. 'Then look at how much morphine he's requiring over twenty-four hours, and adjust the hourly rate accordingly.'

'That's not dissimilar to the PCA that he disabled,' the anaesthetist pointed out.

John shook his head. 'That only gives a bolus on top of the infusion rate,' he said. 'That's why he cracked the code. He needed more than it would give him. He need control over the infusion rate to achieve the analgesia that he felt that he required.'

'He could have just - asked?' the nurse said questioningly. 'Why didn't he just ask?'

'Not his style,' John said. 'The stupid bastard always has to do everything for himself. You're going to have your work cut out for you, I'm afraid, once he wakes up.'

John sat there, reading the paper cover to cover, and drinking the tea that the nurse bought him until Sherlock finally woke up some ninety minutes later. He let out a low moan as he opened his eyes, hand going automatically to the right side of his chest.

'And that's what you get when you play silly buggers with your morphine pump,' John said, as he reached across to start the infusion again from the new pump, set according to his instructions. 'And if you do that again, Sherlock, then they'll take it away from you altogether. You know that they will.'

Sherlock shut his eyes again and lay still, waiting, John knew, for the morphine to kick in, and the pain to die down.

'Did you sort it out?' he asked, when he finally opened his eyes again.

'Did I sort what out?'

'That ridiculous PCA thing. Did you get them to change it to something more sensible?'

'Standard infusion, with a capacity for you to adjust the rate for a maximum of twenty minute at a time, and the agreement that they'll adjust the infusion rate accordingly on a daily basis, depending on how much you need.'

'Perfect - thank you.' There was an edge of smugness to Sherlock's tone.

'Thank - hang on, are you trying to tell me that you did this deliberately to get what you wanted? Sherlock you could have killed yourself - again.'

'Unlikely. I calculated the dose based on what I'd used in the past. Purity is difficult to assess when you buy it on the street of course,' he paused to yawn, 'but it sounds as if my approximation was accurate. Thank you for stopping them using the naloxone by the way.'

John glared at him, resisting the temptation to punch him.

'What?' Sherlock asked innocently.

'You are the stupidest, most inconsiderate bastard, that I ever...'

'And yet here you are,' Sherlock said calmly.

'Here I am. Again,' John said. Sherlock turned to look at him, and they both smiled. Then John sniggered and Sherlock started to laugh, then grimaced and clutched his chest again.

'Only hurts when you laugh?' John asked. 'Sorry.'

'Turn it up, will you?' Sherlock asked, and John complied.

'Sherlock - about the morphine.'

'The morphine or the heroin, John?'

'It wasn't just for a case, was it.'

'I needed Magnussen to believe that I was a drug addict.'

'And the cocaine and the ketamine? Were they part of your plan too?'

'Did Molly tell you?'

'No, we had a tox screen done after the shooting. The medical staff here needed to know.'

'The more drugs, the more convincing the -'

'Bollocks,' John cut in.

'I'm sorry?'

'You heard me. It's bollocks. You used those drugs because you wanted to.'

Sherlock yawned again and closed his eyes.

'No, you don't,' John said, reaching out to turn the morphine down again. 'You're not getting out of it that easily. This is serious, Sherlock.'

'I've just come off intensive care after major surgery, John. Do you really think this is the time to discuss this?'

'Yes, I do. Sherlock, tell me. What's going on?'

But Sherlock had closed his eyes again, and despite the lower dose of morphine was fast asleep.

John let out a groan of frustration and resisted the temptation to punch something - Sherlock probably. Pre-contemplative, was that what Mary had called it? Denial was more like it. He needed to know what Sherlock had been up to and why. He pulled Sherlock's holdall out of the bedside locker again, and extracted his phone. If he wanted to play silly buggers, then John was perfectly willing to beat him at his own game.

Sensible of him to have charged Sherlock's phone for him the night before. The battery had gone flat in the days since it had been handed to John in the Resucitation Room, together with Sherlock's other personal possessions. His clothes had gone into brown paper bags and seized by CID for forensic examination, but his wallet, phone and watch had been given to John for safe-keeping.

John flicked down Sherlock's contact list, until he found the number that he was looking for.

'Shezza?' came the voice at the other end. 'We missed you, man. Where have you been? You after some gear?'

'No,' John replied. 'I'm after some information. And I think that you, Bill Wiggins, are exactly the man to give it to me.'

* * *

If you want to know what Mary got up to whem she was meant to be with Cath, then have a look at 'Conversations and Conspiracies'. It's the first in a series of 'side conversations', running in parallel with this story. Please do have a look and let me know what you all think!


	13. Chapter 13

Sherlock had taught John a lot; more than he had realised. He had taught him how to re-construct several weeks, a month even, of a man's life. He had taught him how to talk to relevant parties to work out where he had been and when. It had taught him how to trace the journey of an addiction, and John was in absolutely no doubt of the significance of what he had discovered.

That Sherlock had been using drugs was clear. That he had been doing so in plain sight in order to ensure that Magnussen would be aware of what he was doing was also clear. John wished with all his heart that he could believe Sherlock's story that this was all for a case, but there were signs there that not even he could miss.

Sherlock had shut himself away from everyone other than Janine for the last four weeks. He had seen her twice a week, always on the same days. Something stopped John from prying too closely into the gritty details of Janine's relationship with Sherlock. He found that he simply didn't want to know. It felt - wrong, somehow - unsettling. He told himself that it was because he was aware that the whole thing was a fake, a ruse to get into Magnussen's office, but a niggling voice at the back of his head told him that he'd been unsettled by it from the beginning, even before he'd know the truth of it.

He had simply never considered Sherlock in that light before. Irene Adler apart, he had never seen him show the slightest sign of interest in any human being in that way - male or female. Initially, he had been convinced that Sherlock was gay and simply chose not to act on it. The care he gave to his personal appearance, his particularness when it came to his suits and shirts had led him to that conclusion. As time went on, he had come to realise that it was a uniform - more than that, it was armour. Sherlock had learnt long ago how to dress in order to achieve the result that he wanted. To be respected. To be trusted. There was almost a superstition in how he dressed, a fear that if he let his guard slip then the world would see the bubbling mass of contradictions that lay within. Like his ability to wheedle information out of people by acting a part, he dressed himself in a costume which facilitated this. His suits made him feel safe. They were his protection against the world. In the flat he would slop about in pyjama trousers and old t-shirts, often worn inside out. But outside, outside it was always the suit, and the coat, of course the coat.

Since his return, Sherlock had seemed - different. Less ethereal, more present in the real world. More mature? Perhaps, but there was something else that John had chosen to ignore. He had seemed more - sombre somehow. He still attacked cases with drive and his old single-mindedness, but the energy, the sheer joy in it, that was gone. What had happened to Sherlock in those two years away, John wondered? Sherlock had never spoken of it, had said that it was safer that way, but John couldn't help but think that the events of those two years had shaped the man that now resided in 221B Baker Street. Had it shaped his drug habit also? There was a chance, wasn't there?

John Watson knew all about psychological trauma. About the events that at the time you thought you'd dealt with, but which came back to bite you weeks, months, even years later. He knew about the flash-backs and the nightmares, about the voices that you just couldn't get out of your head. He knew the haunted look in a man's eyes that came from the knowledge of shots fired and lives taken. He had seen it in Sherlock's eyes after his return.

So if you had seen horrors beyond most people's imagining. If you had been beaten and tortured (and John had seen the marks on Sherlock's back when he had walked in on him changing one day, marks that hadn't been there two years ago). If you had been through all of that, and couldn't talk about it, what then? That would change a man, wouldn't it? Make him more serious, less joyful. And if his best friend, his only friend, was inadvertently, or perhaps deliberately, distancing himself from him, with a new love, with a new wife, then what other and damaging ways of dealing with their experiences might a man find?

These thoughts had taken John from the tube station to the alleyway leading up to the squat where he had found Sherlock and Isaac on that fateful morning. Billy Wiggins had hung up on him immediately when he had called him from Sherlock's phone, of course he had, and he hadn't replied to a call to John's own phone either. Spooked. Good. It was always better to have your potential informant on the back foot. Especially when you knew where to find them.

The squat looked more menacing in the gloom of dusk, although Billy Wiggins himself looked no less pathetic. John found himself wondering at Sherlock's choice of venue - it was a long way from Baker Street. Had that been deliberate? It fitted that he wouldn't necessarily want to bump into any of his own Homeless Network if he was going undercover, but then why not use them as a way in? Perhaps he had. And why pick a venue so close to where John himself lived? It seemed too much of a coincidence. Had Sherlock planted himself there deliberately, knowing that John was likely to pitch up to rescue Isaac sooner or later? Had he wanted John to find him? And if so why?

John walked straight past the door to the squat, and picked a spot to wait apparently playing with his phone on the far side of the skip situated outside, partly shielded from view of the door, but still with a good eye-line to it, enabling him to watch and wait.

What he did work out fairly rapidly, was that there was some kind of secret knock to gain admission. What was this, The Secret Seven for fuck's sake? Deciding there was no time like the present, he walked up to the front door, wishing he had his tyre iron with him, and knocked on the door. Billy Wiggins opened it, and when he saw John, took a step back and threw his arms up defensively. 'Don't hit me!' he said.

'I'm not going to hit you,' John's said with a sigh, walking into the hallway of the squat and shutting the door behind him. 'I just want to talk to you.'

'About what?'

'About Sherlock.'

'What about him? Haven't seen him for days. Not since that morning when you tried to break my arm,' Billy said, rubbing it, as if only just remembering that it still hurt.

'I didn't -' John started, then realising that he was on the wrong tack if he wanted to get information out of him. 'Look, I'm sorry about that, although strictly speaking I was just disarming you. How is it? Do you want me to have a look?'

'So you can break it for real this time? Not bleeding likely,' Billy said, taking another step back and pulling his sleeves down over his hands as if that would protect him. He was younger than John had first thought, although it was difficult to work out his exact age. Mid to late twenties perhaps, but the life that he had led had made him look older; the had been aged by adversity. John wondered what sort of life had brought Billy onto the streets. His work in general practice in this area meant that it wasn't too much of a deductive leap to imagine. It would involve violence, certainly, although whether to Billy or his mother was always more difficult to work out - both usually. Then there would have been the other abuse that would have driven him onto the street; neglect and emotional abuse at best, sexual abuse at worst, often from a family friend or one of mum's new partners. There would be alcohol or drugs involved somewhere along the line, nearly always. Other children may have been taken into care. Billy had probably been in and out of the care system himself. It was a story that John had heard all too often. The details varied - the names, the dates, the places, but the basic story; that was nearly always the same.

John was going about this wrong. He knew he was. He had been angry with Billy. For providing Sherlock with drugs, for giving him a place to inject poison into his veins, but he was coming at it from entirely the wrong direction.

'Billy, I need you help,' he said.


	14. Chapter 14

'So you're Shezza's friend, and you want me to tell you stuff so that you can help him?' Billy Wiggins said uncertainly. He was sitting across from John in the cafe round the corner from the squat, empty plate of food pushed to one side. It had taken some persuasion on John's part to get him to accompany him there, but concern for Sherlock and the need for knowledge had done it in the end. Billy Wiggins was proving something of an enigma. He was bright, that much was obvious; he was street-smart, but he was also oddly naive, with a child-like quality that reminded John uncomfortably of Sherlock.

'That's about the long and short of it,' he said in answer to Billy's question.

'So - why don't you just ask him yourself?'

'Because he's been very badly injured, Billy,' John explained patiently, for what felt like the fifth time that evening. 'He's not really in a fit state to tell me anything.'

'You mean that he won't tell you anything. I mean he's conscious and all. He's off intensive care, you've told me that. So if he's not telling you stuff, then maybe it's because he don't want you to know.'

'What? No! He's just not up to talking much, that's all, ' John said, aware that he was being far from convincing. Christ, he wasn't even convincing himself.

Billy was sitting staring hard at at John, hands templed under his chin, obviously in full deductive mode.

'Don't do that,' John muttered, pushing one of Billy's elbows off the table to force him to move his hands. 'You look like him.'

Billy scowled as his elbow jolted off the table, but took the hint and moved his hands from their steepled position. It was an exact mirror of Sherlock's reaction when John did the same to him. He never could stand that hand-templing thing. Not when Sherlock was sitting across from him at a table, anyway. Some form of character assassination invariably followed.

'I've been learning,' Billy said, recovering his composure quickly. 'He's been learning me, no, teaching me. Hot on his grammar, isn't he?'

'Did you know who he was?' John asked, wondering exactly how deep Sherlock's connection with Billy went. Not just a doorkeeper then, unless he was a doorkeeper for Sherlock, a lookout. Now there was a possibility that he hadn't considered before. 'I mean before I came along. Did you know that he was Sherlock Holmes?'

'Did wonder,' Billy said with a shrug. 'Didn't really care to be honest. He was a good bloke - interesting, you know. Got me to do things for him, bought me meals in here. Taught me stuff. Interesting stuff.'

'What sort of things did he get you to do for him?' John asked, but Billy shook his head.

'You see, here's the thing. You say you're his mate, right, but you turn up in there, drag him out of there practically by the ear, both of you shoutin' and with fists flyin', then you take him to that lab place with that fit bird -'

'Mary?' John asked.

'That the blonde bird?' Billy asked. Then in answer to John's nod. 'Na, not her. I mean no disrespect, but she's a bit old for me. No I mean the one with the long brown hair in the lab, the pretty, feisty one that slapped Shezza. I liked her.'

'Molly,' John said. 'You mean Molly.'

'Yeah that's the one. Anyway, point is you drag Shezza there, force him to have a drugs test, tell him off like you're his dad or something, and then you try to tell me that you're his mate and I should tell you what's been going on.' He shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

'I'm trying to help him, Billy,' John said.

'Maybe he don't need your help.'

'He's using drugs, Billy.'

Billy shrugged, 'So? Maybe he wants to do drugs, maybe he needs to. What gives you the right to dictate how he lives his life?'

'Because his life has led to him lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole in his chest!' John realised that he was shouting, and stopped abruptly, hands up. 'Sorry! Sorry!' He mumbled to the suddenly silenced cafe.

'Look Billy,' he said carefully. 'Sherlock - he isn't like other people. His decisions - they aren't always good ones. He needs people around, people to stop him doing anything stupid.'

'Oh, I see,' Billy said, leaning back and regarding John with an approximation of Sherlock's analytical stare. 'You feel guilty!' he said triumphantly. 'You feel guilty that you haven't bin watching him like you think you should. Haven't been around much have you, what with your new and shiny wedding ring and that baby that's due in what January?'

'February,' John said, 'and how the hell did you know about that?'

'I watch, don't I? And I notice things. So you feel guilty about not having seen your old mate, while you've been playing happy families in the suburbs, and now you're trying to pretend that it's all his fault, and that you can just swan in and tell him what to do with his life.'

'That has nothing to do with it,' John said, way too quickly, too defensively. 'Look I just need to know what he's been using and for how long.'

'Why?'

'I told you!' John said, exasperated, 'So that I can help him.'

'And I told you -' Billy said with emphasis, 'that maybe he don't need your help.'

John sighed and reached into his pocket for his wallet. 'Look, Billy,' he said, pulling out several notes, 'I appreciate that you feel a sense of loyalty to Sherlock. Maybe -'

'Fuck off,' Billy said, standing up with a screech of chair that made everyone look at them again. 'You think that I'd sell out a mate for a handful of cash? You don't know anything. Your type with their fancy cars, and nice houses, and expensive shoes. You think we're all scum and you can just buy us off? It don't work like that. You want to help Shezza? Then maybe you should just keep your nose out of what you don't understand.'

'Billy, wait,' John started to say, realising that he'd badly miscalculated the situation, but Billy was already walking out of the cafe, hood up, slamming the door behind him.

'Nice one, John,' John murmured to himself as he threw a handful of coins onto the table as a tip and an apology to the cafe staff, grabbed his coat from the back of the chair and hurried to the door to see if he could catch up with Billy, but he had long gone.

John ran a hand through his recently cropped hair. Looked as if Sherlock had taught Billy his disappearing trick too. So what now? He obviously wasn't going to get anywhere with Billy tonight. He should go home, to Mary, to the suburbs, to his nice comfortable house. But his conversation with Billy had made him feel uncomfortable about that. Instead he found himself heading back towards the familiarity of Baker Street, and whatever answers he could find there.

* * *

Huge thanks to Sevenpercent and ThessalyMac for keeping me on track with this one, and especially for making me change John from BAMF John, to the more thoughtful Dr Watson that I've hopefully ended up with. Billy has also turned out to be a far more interesting individual than I could ever have imagined!

Thanks for reading x


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